Ferrari: Movie Review

Cast: Adam Driver, Shailene Woodley, Penelope Cruz
Director: Michael Mann

Heat director Michael Mann's tale of the storm clouds gathering around Enzo Ferrari and his company is less about life on the track and more about one man's quest to get round a lap of his own life without smashing into any obstacles.

An impassive Driver, complete with House of Gucci accent, stars as Ferrari, against a backdrop of 1957 that sees financial ruin circling around his racing car world - and one that sees him forced into a confrontation with his wife Laura over his future.

But with Ferrari gambling everything on one last race and also his own empire's personal future, the noose grows tighter around his neck as a secret son, a marriage in its final days and a legacy all hang in the balance.

Ferrari is a dour affair, one that plays out more as a family drama with racing tacked on around the periphery. 

It's not a bad way to tell a story, but in Mann's execution, the air is let out of the tyres, and the cinematic car appears to be chugging when it should just be speeding along. Driver does nothing to endear the monstrous Ferrari to an audience, playing him as a Machiavellian plotter, pulling at the strings, but emotionally unable to face the consequences.

One scene sees a driver killed in an horrific crash at a test site, but rather than mourn Ferrari blames the driver, scolds his motivations and then in the same breath tells a hopeful driver to come see him on Monday for a job. The effect is obviously monstrous, and Driver's almost aloof countenance throughout helps seal Ferrari as less of an enigma and more of an abhorrent human above all else.

It's evident in the scenes with Cruz and Woodley too, with both having a different emotional edge, but with neither truly feeling like they gel. Woodley appears to have the bigger part, but then she dwindles out of existence in the script, a casualty of a character being reduced to a mechanic rather than a fully-fledged one.

There's too much of a casual approach deployed throughout - and while the racing scenes, with all their bluster and engine noise soar, much of the emotional drama feels too distant, too icy and too designed to engender indifference in the audience.

The narrative is too much of a spluttering engine to engage - it may have a high intensity in places, but Mann's inherent inability here to deploy that throughout proves to be a fatal flaw that confines this more to the pitlane than to a soaring chequered flag.