Gran Turismo: Movie Review

Cast: Archie Madekwe, Orlando Bloom, David Harbour, Djimon Hounsou, Geri Halliwell
Director: Neill Blomkamp

There are not many different ways to do a sports story - no matter what the source material is.

Inevitably, they are always underdog stories, always follow a certain trajectory and always have a predictable arc and denouement. 

So it is with Gran Turismo, a movie based on a game that's technically second to none, but is a bit lacking for anyone who's not fully into cars and the specifics of a perfect drive.

In many ways, the film version of the game is somewhat similar to the eternally popular racing simulator series - technically adept, visually thrilling in parts and yet somehow emotionally aloof and entirely predictable.

Based on the true story, it follows avid GT gamer Jann Mardenborough who's going nowhere according to his former footballer father (Hounsou). Obsessed with the game and one of the best, Jann finds a potential future and lifeline when Orlando Bloom's Nissan marketer Danny Moore decides to put into motion a plan to get the best GT player in the world into an actual race car.

With the odds against him, Jann finds himself competing in the GT Academy, under the wearied tutelage of former chief engineer Jack Salter (Stranger Things' Harbour). But will he have enough to take his virtual skills into the real world?

You can see exactly where Gran Turismo is going before it's even got out of the pit lane.

Will Salter become a surrogate father figure? Will Moore's scheme work? Will Mardenborough succeed? Will the gratuitous product placement take hold on the audience?

None of it is a surprise by any stretch of the imagination - but in large parts of Gran Turismo, Blomkamp takes the predictable and gives it a little twist to turn it into something compelling throughout. Races are cut in parts, reduced by frenetic editing into something that's only seconds long, or reduced entirely into just graphics of placement on screen. Scenes of normal racing which would consist of the continual ins and outs from the dashboard are taken into the gaming world and avatars are placed above the rooves of the cars.

And in one truly impressive VFX scene, a car is created and disassembled around Mardenborough himself on the tracks, getting to the heart both of the immersion of the game but also the intensity and connectivity one feels with simulator games such as Gran Turismo. There's an intimacy suggested in parts which outweighs some of the more predictable and rote moments of the script.

However, the emotion is somewhat lacking in Gran Turismo and what should be a fist-pumping victory lap at times turns into something that feels muted. Conflict between drivers is reduced to the stereotypes and the very basics - and to say this film is a boy's club is something of an understatement (though perhaps one should be relieved there are no pit girls on the podium).

Gran Turismo succeeds in being visceral at times, and thrilling in small doses. It's possibly one of the smartest ways to adapt a racing simulator video game, but at times, it gets swept away by its own technical elements and forgets a little more about the human side that makes these underdog stories so compelling to behold.