A little way into the movie Gran Turismo, the unlikely brand extension of Sonyâs sim racing games accidentally satirizes itself. âThis whole thing is a marketing extravaganza!â excitable auto executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) shouts at salty racing coach Jack Salter (David Harbour). Theyâre aboard a helicopter wheeling above a racetrack, where Salterâs students in the GT Academy â a real-life program intended to turn players of Sonyâs Gran Turismo games into actual racing drivers â are being put through their paces. The helicopter is an absurd bit of theater for the TV cameras, and Salter knows it. But heâs powerless to resist the marketing apparatus around him.
So are the people behind the Gran Turismo movie. The familiar phrase âbased on a true storyâ is slathered all over its marketing â in some cases, even presented as part of the filmâs official title. That awkward straining for legitimacy echoes throughout the film. In a year when confident, authentic video game adaptations have risen to the top of the heap both in theatrical release and on television, and Greta Gerwig has turned cinema-as-sponcon into a multifaceted art form, Sonyâs movie brings us crashing back down to Earth.
Directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium director, tech innovator, and wannabe video game creator), Gran Turismo is a broad, trashy, true-ish sports drama that has a lot less in common with The Last of Us or The Super Mario Bros. Movie than it does with triumph-of-the-brand advertorial like Air, Ben Affleckâs biography of a sneaker. Its closest cousin is Tetris, Appleâs retelling of Nintendoâs tussle with the Soviet Union over the marketing rights to the classic puzzle game. Just like Tetris, Gran Turismo solves the conundrum of how to adapt a game without any characters: by unearthing a compelling human story behind it. And just like Tetris, it strays pretty far from both truth and plausibility in its overcooked take on real-life events â then self-consciously frames those events with video game-y graphics, to remind everyone of their unreal inspiration.
Gran Turismo is a fictionalized account of the rise of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a British teen who dreamed of being a racing driver as he played racing games in his bedroom, then made that dream into a reality. In 2011, he won the GT Academyâs top prize: a contract to drive for a real Nissan motorsports team. Since then, he built a reasonable career as a pro: He raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans several times, and went on to compete in Japanâs Super GT series.
The movie compresses, reorders, and massages the details of his story until they (a) resemble the tried-and-true beats of a sports biopic, and (b) serve the needs of the productionâs marketing partners. After all, it wouldnât do to show Mardenborough practicing on a period-appropriate PlayStation 3 rather than a modern-era PS5, or driving open-wheel Formula 3 cars around dreary British motordromes instead of racing a branded Nissan around glitzy Abu Dhabi. The movie has some laughable inventions, like a police chase around the streets of Cardiff thatâs more Grand Theft Auto than Gran Turismo. (âCop avoidance achieved!â shouts the on-screen graphic.)
But the big moments are all true, or true enough. The GT Academy program was indeed the brainchild of a Nissan U.K. marketing exec, who had to convince both Gran Turismo mastermind Kazunori Yamauchi and Nissanâs motorsports division of its genius. That actual exec, Darren Cox, may not have looked as slick as Orlando Bloom does in the role, but he was as persuasive a salesman. (Still is, if his producer credit alongside Mardenborough and Yamauchi is anything to go by.) Mardenborough did indeed score third place in his class at Le Mans, compete in an all-GT Academy team of sim drivers, and survive a horrific accident, as the film shows â albeit not in the order the film shows it, or under the circumstances the filmmakers contrive.
There is one particularly troubling aspect to the way American Sniper co-writer Jason Hall and Creed III co-writer Zach Baylin frame the accident, a freak occurrence at the NĂŒrburgring circuit that killed a spectator. While the crash did happen pretty much as depicted, Hall and Baylinâs screenplay time-shifts it in order to stage it as a defining, motivating setback on Mardenboroughâs heroâs journey to his Le Mans podium. The actual accident happened years later â arguably a tasteless reframing of a fatal event.
The filmâs best invention is Harbourâs character â chief engineer Jack Salter, whom Nissan drafts to train the young racers and keep them safe. Thereâs nothing original about the character or his arc: Heâs a cussed has-been who coulda been a contender, straight out of the sports-movie playbook. But Harbour invests him with an ornery warmth, and he both works up all the biggest laughs and creates the filmâs most touching moments with Madekwe.
The filmâs script reduces most other characters to ciphers whose only role is to illustrate one gamerâs rise to greatness. The most egregious example of this is perfunctory love interest Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley). Mardenboroughâs parents, Steve (Djimon Hounsou, wearing his most disapproving frown) and Lesley (a rather sweet Geri Halliwell-Horner â yes, Ginger Spice) might have had more to them in some drafts, but theyâre given short shrift in the edit.
Meanwhile, Gran Turismo fans will enjoy seeing Yamauchi (as played by Giri/Hajiâs Takehiro Hira) gazing stoically upon press conferences, racing cars, and the curve of the asphalt. The filmâs relationship to the games is the oddest thing about it. It opens with a minutes-long ad for the series, and closes with credits featuring manufactured footage of Polyphony Digital engineers scanning in carsâ bodywork and recording their enginesâ growls, as if the gamesâ authenticity still needed underlining. The script is awash with back-of-the-box talking points about the gamesâ realism, while sound effects and graphics get callouts.
And the movieâs whole premise is the realization of Yamauchiâs long-held dream that his love of cars and motorsports could bleed out of his games and enter the real world. In his pitch meeting at the start of the movie, Dannyâs lament about the decline of car culture â âpeople would rather be on their phone in the back of an Uber than behind the wheelâ â could have come directly from Yamauchiâs most recent press tour.
And yet thereâs nothing of the gamesâ spirit here. Gran Turismo games express their automotive passion in a way thatâs scholarly, precise, tasteful, and a little quirky. Theyâre scored with elevator jazz and presented with exquisite finesse. They find their excitement in moments of thrilling verisimilitude: reflections gliding across paintwork or car suspensions shuddering over curbs. By contrast, Blomkampâs movie is brash and amped-up. (Though it does have a pretty good running joke involving the Muzak stylings of Enya and Kenny G.) His direction of the racing scenes (much of them shot practically rather than built digitally) apes camera angles from the games, but cuts them together in a frenetic, noisy style thatâs enthralling at the start of the film and wearyingly samey by the end. It honestly feels more like a Forza or Need for Speed movie than a Gran Turismo adaptation.
Worse, the gamesâ cool self-possession is completely lost amid the insecure gamer power fantasy that has blighted video game-themed movies from Pixels and Ready Player One in the 2010s all the way back to The Wizard and The Last Starfighter in the 1980s. In this fantasy, a nerdy boy gets mocked for playing with his joystick in his bedroom, but he eventually uses gaming skills to save the day, win the prize, and get the hot girl, proving the doubters (usually his parents) wrong. Mardenboroughâs story is unfortunately a perfect vehicle for this narrative, and the filmmakers lean into it in the most cringeworthy way â not just in the cheesy graphics and lines like âHow are we doing, gamers?â and âPress play, dude!â but in setting up the primary antagonist as a preening racer who leads an entirely fictitious campaign against sim drivers infiltrating the sport.
Gamers arenât an oppressed minority anymore â if they ever were in any venue outside of their own heads and the media reflecting their fantasies. This kind of aggrieved posturing isnât a good look in 2023. Geek culture won. Mardenboroughâs story is real, and has a much more significant dimension than victory in some imagined gaming culture war. Games gave this kid from a low-income family a viable and affordable route into one of the worldâs most elitist sports. Gran Turismo could have used this inspiring true story to show how video games open up possibilities and remove barriers in the real world. Instead, it just uses it to score points.
Gran Turismo opens in U.S. theaters on Aug. 25.
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