Whew! Well, folks, it's been weeks since my last trip to the movies. The local theater has either been repeating stuff I've already seen, such as Oppenheimer, or stuff I never wanted to see, such as Barbie. I've been holding out for a movie I actually liked the looks of, and that was (in this instance) Gran Turismo: a PlayStation Studios flick about a PlayStation car racing simulator and the Welsh kid who became so good at playing it that the brass at Nissan decided, as a marketing stunt, to make him a real-life race car driver.
All right, that's a gross oversimplification. To correct that, I'd recommend watching the movie. The kid's name is Jann Mardborough, and somehow, beyond belief, his adventure is based on a true story – to the extent that the real Jann Mardborough served as a stunt double for the actor playing him. He was the son of a sometime professional footballer (in American, that's a soccer player) who is constantly pressuring Jann to turn off that stupid video game and start preparing for a real career. But the kid has dreams, and he fights his way to the top of an auto racing boot camp tailored to elite Gran Turismo players, and then he has to deal with the harsh reality of driving real race cars on a real race track surrounded by real drivers, to say nothing of pit crews, who hate his guts.
Boy, is that kid tested. But as things go in sports movies, as well as (apparently) video game movies, he aces the test in a way that makes all kinds of people proud, including people who never believed in him when it mattered. He gets beaten up, emotionally and physically. He experiences setbacks and downright tragedy. He also kisses a cute girl and forms a deep connection with a grizzled veteran of the racing circuit. It's a heart-string-yanking story of personal growth and heroic achievement, and the icing on top is footage at the end showing the real Jann (pronounced "Yon") right alongside the young actor who plays him.
Directed by Neil Blomkamp (late of District 9, Elysium and a couple more recent flicks I didn't see), the cast is headlined by David Harbour of Stranger Things and the 2019 Hellboy as Jann's chief engineer, Geri Halliwell (a.k.a. Ginger Spice) and Djimon Honsou as Jann's parents, Orlando Bloom as the Nissan U.K. marketing wonk who cooks up the whole stunt, Thomas Kretschmann as the father of a snotty rival driver, and (apparently) the actual creator of Gran Turismo in a cameo role as a sushi chef. The hero kid is played by somebody named Archie Madekwe, a name that means nothing to me but that I'm bookmarking in my brain in case I start seeing a lot more of it. He does a good job, covering a remarkable range of emotional states, despite playing a basically softspoken guy who spends a lot of time encased in a costume that inhibits scenery chewing (outside of one heart-stopping crash scene).
Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Salter, Jann's engineer, blasts Kenny G and Enya at him through their comms when Jann freezes on the racetrack. It's a funny yet dramatically clinching moment. (2) The crash scene and its immediate sequelae. Wow. Gripping stuff. (3) The bit where Jann's race car "explodes" around him and we find him mentally in his bedroom back at home, driving his PlayStation – a striking inversion of a previous scene in which an imagined car builds itself around him while he's driving the simulator at his neighborhood arcade.
There really were a lot more scenes that made it for me, though. For a movie in which a blink-and-you'll-miss-it verbal referenace to Speed Racer isn't out of place, it carries a lot of weight and is just a top-quality piece of entertainment. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that I spent a goodly portion of this movie squeezing a rolled-up Reese's Pieces box in my fist, too caught up in the moment to blink or breathe. Don't sneer at it. Movies like this get re-watched.
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