135 min | PG-13 | August 25, 2023 | Columbia Pictures
A British teenager wins a video game and ends up strapped into a real race car. The pitch is a marketing executive’s fever dream made flesh. The surprise is that it mostly works on the track and stalls everywhere else.
Jann Mardenborough is a working-class kid from Cardiff who plays Gran Turismo in his bedroom instead of chasing the soccer career his father wants. A Nissan marketing scheme plucks the best players from their consoles and trains them to drive actual GT cars. Jann gets the seat. The film is the true story of a simulation racer who crosses into a sport that costs money he does not have and risks lives that simulators cannot. Underneath the underdog beats, this is a feature-length advertisement that occasionally remembers it is also a movie about a young man learning that consequences are not respawnable.
Archie Madekwe plays Mardenborough with a watchful quiet that suits a kid more comfortable behind a wheel than in a room full of people. He underplays the big emotional moments, which keeps the character from curdling into a poster. David Harbour does the heavy lifting as Jack Salter, the burnt-out engineer turned driver coach who treats the gamers as a gimmick before he buys in. Harbour gives Salter a slumped, hungover decency that grounds every scene he shares with Madekwe. Orlando Bloom plays Danny Moore, the marketing man who dreamed up the program, as a salesman who never stops selling, and Djimon Hounsou anchors the home front as Jann’s skeptical father Steve.
Neill Blomkamp directs from a script by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin, and his best instinct is to put the camera inside the machinery. He renders the racing line as floating graphics and dissolves the cockpit into exploded engine parts mid-corner, collapsing the boundary between the game interface and the physical car. The sound design pulls the same trick, layering console menu blips into the roar of real engines. The driving sequences carry genuine velocity and spatial clarity, which is more than most racing films manage. The screenplay around them is assembled from spare parts. The dialogue states the themes out loud, the rival drivers are sneers in racing suits, and the based-on-truth events get smoothed and reordered until they stop resembling anything that happened.
This is a competent crowd-pleaser built on a foundation it never quite trusts. The racing is the reason to watch and the brand integration is the reason to flinch. Blomkamp wants the audience to feel the cost of one real crash, and the film’s strongest stretch sits in the silence after it. Then the machinery of triumph cranks back up and sands the moment down. The result delivers the rush it promises and dodges every harder question it raises along the way.