Video game movies tend to come in two flavours. They’re either about video game characters in their separate video game world, or they’re about those characters making in their way into the ‘real world’. On both counts, studios have historically struggled with making such movies worthwhile, although with the recent successes of The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (I specify the sequel because the original is still pretty naff), that tide has definitely been turning of late.
However, much like pretty much anything director Neill Blomkamp has ever put his name to, this isn’t your run-of-the-mill example of the genre. It’s not set in a fictional world, nor does it involve fictional characters entering ours; instead, it’s about a real-life example of a gamer turning his passion for racing games into a professional career in car racing. It’s closer to The Wizard than it is any recent video game movie, given that both the IP of Gran Turismo and its copyright holders (developers Polyphony Digital and publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment) feature heavily into the film’s plot.
To that end, we have Archie Madekwe as Jann Mardenborough, a GT player who gets his chance to race for Nisson after winning a game tournament, and to a degree, it plays into the kind of wish fulfilment fantasy such an underdog story would warrant. Many people joke about how video games are totally educational at their base because they teach hand-eye coordination and map-reading (because Dude forbid a pastime activity just be engaged with for fun, there absolutely has to be a ‘practical’ purpose for it), but there’s a definite pull for Jann’s story here as someone taking those hours and hours of gameplay and translating it into something practical… although not necessarily because he’s serving as the avatar for every Gamer™ out there.
Instead, the script and indeed Blomkamp’s visual framing of the story emphasises more of his outsider status amongst the other racers. His main rival throughout the story is Nicholas Capa (Josha Stradowski), who is as your average sports flick douchey bad guy, and is described as having essentially bought his way into the races. This is compared with people like Jann, who genuinely loves this sport and grabs his place within it on what he knows and what he can do. It cuts into the elitist mindset of not just professional sports, but professional anything, furthering Blomkamp’s penchant for highlighting technology as a tool to uplift the lower classes (usually in response to it being exploited by the upper classes).
There’s something about this specific take on the underdog come-up that really got to me as it kept going. I mean, I’m something of a case study for turning a personal hobby into a professional job. Rather than getting in through the formal academic side of things (which, for both financial and stress reasons, has never really worked out for me), I got in through a stroke of luck and being able to show that I knew my shit and could be relied on to get the job done. It’s years old at this point, but this kind of highlights why I had (and to a degree, still do have) a problem with critics like Armond White, who treat the job as something so sanctified that mere ‘plebs’ have no reason to be anywhere near it: Being able to live off of what you love doing shouldn’t be a luxury relegated to the rich or the supremely lucky.
Of course, I need to check myself here because, when I write about movies on here and elsewhere, the worst thing that can come out of it is that someone might get in their feelings and think I was too harsh/not harsh enough towards a piece of fictional media and/or the people who made it. Not, say, risk of physical injury or death, as is the case with professional race car driving. This is something that is mentioned early on as a potential danger for bringing someone who only knows about the track through a computer screen onto the real-life thing, but when it actually starts to factor in… man, it hits pretty damn hard. I’ve already made too much of this review about myself, so I’ll keep it brief, but suffice to say, Jann is confronted with a dilemma that… well, I’d likely be agonising over that shit for years, no matter what decision I followed it with.
Yeah, there’s a definite emotional impact to it, helped by the script co-written by King Richard and Creed III writer Zach Baylin (along with former Dingoes Ate My Baby lead singer Jason Hall), but it’s got plenty of visceral punch to it as well. Jacques Jouffret’s cinematography and Colby Parker Jr. and Austyn Daines’ editing build on the split-second decision-making that is asked of racers and give that same aesthetic to the visual presentation, quick-cutting between speedy drone footage, close-ups of the inner mechanisms of the cars, and some good tight close-ups of the drivers to really sell the intensity of each race.
It plays due respect to the video games visually as well. I’ll admit that I was never that big into sim racers like GT (I was always more about Need For Speed), but watching the races here, it generates some familiar sensations to my own gaming experiences. When you get some good speed going, you hit those L-turns just right, and it feels like you’re gliding over the road and nothing can stop you… man, I got to fire up Most Wanted again, I’ve missed this feeling. There’s also visual flourishes that ape the interface of the GT games, like guide lines on the tracks and a floating position marker over Jann’s car, but even as a casual observer of the source material, it gets the essence of the genre down brilliantly and puts it on the big screen with little bleed-out.
The cast help with the investment too, even with how formulaic a lot of their roles within the story end up being. Madekwe sells the idealism at the heart of the story, David Harbour as his grizzled mentor with a troubled past gets across the beats of that archetype, Orlando Bloom as the marketing exec who came up with the idea does alright, and Djimon Hounsou and Ginger Spice as Jann’s parents… no, that’s not a joke, Geri Halliwell is actually in this. At last, I now have a cinematic image of her in my head that isn’t the bloody Fat Slags movie.
For real, though, Halliwell does okay here, but Hounsou really sells the more downtrodden realism of the first act. He can come across like the standard disbelieving dad in these kinds of stories about British youths chasing their dreams and getting out of the council estates, but the script thankfully doesn’t let him down and reinforces that there is a reason why he’s so tough on the idea: If you chase a dream without a back-up plan, and you don’t get it, then where you end up as a result will end up feeling even worse than it already does.
With how iffy Blomkamp’s films have been of late, it may seem like a back-handed statement to call this the best he’s put out in a while… but considering the well-worn niches of both video game movies and sports movies, its success is amplified by how it takes a different path to a lot of others. It not only delivers on the expected POV character investment, but also frames it with enough environmental context to make his victory mean something. It’s inspirational in a way that a lot of films trying for that kind of reaction end up missing, showing the genuine obstacles to making a career out of something you do for fun anyway… while still highlighting that it is possible. Looking at how far I’ve come in my own journey as a writer, there’s something deep down in me that can’t help but appreciate how much I recognise of myself in this.
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