The life of the young bedroom-dwelling videogame nerd living at home with their parents. Let's take some really good car racing gamers and put them into actual real racing cars to see if they can actually really drive them. Because this is exactly how you recruit young talent these days, by their videogaming prowess. Wait, this is actually a true story??!! Well, I'll be a plumber's brother!
Yes, so in case you never knew (and I'm sure you probably didn't), there actually was a real videogame programme organised by Sony and Nissan called GT Academy, where actual gamers had the chance to compete to gain the opportunity to become real race car drivers. Who knew! No literally, who knew?? This competition was based on the Sony game Gran Turismo 5 and featured thousands of gamers competing in time trials, culminating in a final race to reach the next stage. The next stage was an actual racing camp to train for a track race in real (Nissan 370Z) cars. Whoever won got an actual racing contract with Nissan, no seriously.
So at first I'm watching this thinking, this is corny as hell and I know exactly how this is gonna go. The main character, Jann Mardenborough, is a young misunderstood Black kid who plays Gran Turismo all day, which understandably upsets his dad. It looks like he is throwing his life away until entering and wins this GT competition. At this point, everything changes and his dad starts to take notice. So far, so corny. At the academy things take another predictable twist as we get a very cheesy, over-the-top, militaristic 'Top Gun' with cars scenario. Heck, you could even throw some 'Days of Thunder' into the mix. This entire first half is an almost entirely different movie from the second half, one big cliched training montage.
I think David Harbour's cliched hard-ass training coach character, Jack, says it best at the start when he essentially rips apart the entire premise of the movie. Gamers into actual racers? Videogames aren't reality. We the audience are thinking exactly what he is saying. Honesty there is so much cheese in all this its hard to take anything seriously. The moment when Jann is telling Jack and his team how their cars are running, where the problems are, and that he (a videogamer) knows more than them, really made me scoff frankly. Obviously, in this movie Jann is proved correct, but come on!
The second half of this movie actually turns into a whole dramatic biopic about Mardenborough and his actual racing career. It's so weird, we go from stupid cliched videogame competition nonsense, to a proper biopic that even incorporates a real crash that saw one spectator killed! Talk a tale of two halves. The second half is actually quite good for a racing flick. For the most part, Mardenborough doesn't really do that well, but he's always just about competing. Jack (a former racer himself) stands behind him all the way as he just about manages to hold his own. Things take quite an emotional turn with the crash, but Jack motivates him to get back on the horse, so to speak, and they enter Le Mans with two other racers from back in the academy. A full team of videogame racers, competing in Le Mans! Honesty, this is all true, apparently.
It's at this point where you'd obviously expect Mardenborough and his team to win Le Mans in a rousing and emotional fashion. Proving all the doubters wrong, winning the complete trust of Nissan and all their backers etc...But no! In line with reality, the gamer team finished third at Le Mans, which was still a solid performance. We then find out more about Mardenborough's career in the end credits. Funnily enough, with a bit of Googling you'll see that despite this rags to riches tale of sorts, and despite Mardenborough legitimately proving people wrong and doing really well for himself, is actual racing record isn't all that good. He hasn't won very much at all, competed a lot, but not been that successful.
A strange and quite unbelievable story, and a strange combination of genres in this movie. Going by the title, you'd think this was just a silly racing flick, ala 'The Fast and the Furious', with flashy cars, sexy girls, and young people saying 'bro' all the time. It does indeed kinda start that way, and things don't look too good. But then the movie has a change in gear and becomes something much better. Don't get me wrong, there's still lots of hammy car porn with meaningless internal engine sequences and closeups of disc brakes and pads etc...You know, to make things a bit more 'cool'. Obviously, most of it is pointless and adds nothing.
There are some visuals taken from the videogame, but for anyone who hasn't played it, then this is all pointless. Luckily you don't need to have played the game, I mean, it's a racing simulator, so everyone can get on board. Truth be told, the movie didn't really need to be called Gran Turismo, but I get why they did that. But yeah, overall this did surprise me. I expected another dire videogame adaptation, but we actually got a biopic, and quite a fun one. If you can look past the videogame aspect, and ignore the terrible casting (Ginger Spice?), this is pretty solid entertainment, well, the second half is anyway.
6/10
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