97 min | R | November 18, 2022 | Lionsgate
Ferruccio Lamborghini builds tractors, gets insulted by Enzo Ferrari, and decides to beat him at his own game. Frank Grillo and Gabriel Byrne suit up to play Italian icons across decades of ambition and grudges. The accents arrive long before the drama does.
Ferruccio Lamborghini comes home from the war and builds tractors out of surplus parts. He gets rich. Then Enzo Ferrari insults him, and Ferruccio decides to build a better sports car out of spite. The film frames itself as the origin story of a legend. What it delivers is a flat march through biography that mistakes a list of events for drama.
Frank Grillo plays the older Ferruccio with a gravelly weariness that never finds a second gear. He recites the man’s life instead of inhabiting it. Romano Reggiani plays the younger Ferruccio with more energy and less to do, and the two performances never read as the same person aging. Gabriel Byrne plays Enzo Ferrari in a handful of scenes and walks off with every one of them. Mira Sorvino plays Anita Borgatti as the older Ferruccio’s listener, a part the script flattens into a sounding board.
Bobby Moresco writes and directs, and his script cross-cuts between the young entrepreneur and the aging tycoon without earning the contrast. The editing treats decades as simple scene transitions. The production design dresses postwar Italy in clean, anonymous surfaces that read as a backlot and not a country rebuilding itself. Moresco shoots the factory floor and the racetrack with the same indifferent coverage. The cars, which are the reason this film exists, get less attention than the boardroom conversations about them.
The story has a real engine inside it. A man builds an empire to settle a personal grudge, and the grudge hardens into obsession. Moresco holds all the pieces and assembles none of them. The film announces that Ferruccio Lamborghini is a legend and then spends its length asserting it rather than dramatizing it. It is a biography that admires its subject and forgets to make him interesting.