GRAN TURISMO - Mark Reviews Movies

Gran Turismo, Sony Pictures Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2023

Some credit is due to the makers of Gran Turismo for turning their adaptation of a video game into a story that doesn't simply try to replicate the experience of that game. After all, such an endeavor is almost certainly doomed to fail, since movies and games are completely different mediums with entirely distinct goals and totally divergent ways of experiencing them. Instead, screenwriters Jason Hall and Zach Baylin give us a story that revolves around the playing of the popular racing game—sorry, "racing simulator"—and how success with a controller somehow translates into success in reality.

It's more than a bit of wish fulfillment, but that's also the real-life story of Jann Mardenborough, an avid player of the video game series who won a chance to compete in real-world car races, leading to a professional racing career. This is a very optimistic and potentially inspiring story, although it's a bit too obvious that the filmmakers have been hampered by a string of requirements that undercut the fulfillment of the movie's own goals.

Here, Jann (Archie Madekwe) is the elder son of a working-class family in Cardiff. After leaving college early, he works at a department store and spends all of his free time playing the newest installment of the racing simulator. As a kid, his father Steve (Djimon Hounsou) took him to see a race, and Jann has been obsessed with racing and dreaming of becoming a real racer ever since.

Steve, a former professional soccer player whose career ended before he could become financially stable, knows too well about being disappointed by a dream. When it comes to his older son's ambition, the father doesn't understand racing or, especially, what a life spent playing video games could accomplish for Jann.

The 19-year-old's big and unexpected break arrives when, based on his success in virtual racing a local gaming café, he's automatically entered in a competition to win a spot in GT Academy. It's a program established by a car manufacturer to get gamers more interested in real racing and driving in general.

When marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) introduces the idea to a company board in Tokyo, the line between the character pitching an important piece of plot and the movie pitching us on the real-world company's supposed dedication to making dream come to life blurs. It's a combination of exposition and advertising that eventually begins to overshadow the entire narrative.

Indeed, Jann's story, which has him winning the local race and gradually succeeding at the racing school, is pretty much treated more as a kind of branding—for the video game that helped him see his dream, obviously, and the car company that helped him achieve it—than as a fully functioning narrative. Jann himself exists as a blank slate, upon which gamers and dreamers can put their ambitions, and that makes him pretty dull, beyond the fact that the character's sole defining quality is that he's a bit awkward.

The other characters are given even less to do, although David Harbour, playing Jann's disillusioned coach Jack Salter, does inject some cynical energy into a role that basically amounts to the character yelling clichés or saying them quietly when the scene requires a bit more severity. Jack mainly exists to doubt Jann's racing abilities, before becoming convinced of them as the protagonist does better and better during a string of races-as-montages, and to constantly remind everyone that this is reality, not a video game.

If that's meant to be the case, why are the racing sequences, as envisioned by director Neill Blomkamp, as routine, mostly meaningless, and intentionally distanced from reality as they are here? Most of the time, the movie feels as if it's in a rush to get past the assorted races that constitute Jann's attempt to win a podium spot and obtain his professional license.

The sequences are barely highlight reels, with Blomkamp giving us freeze-frame snippets from a race to show Jann's progress or defeat on the track. When the movie does give us some actual racing action, it's often stylized like the eponymous video game, with a graphic above Jann's car showing his position in the race, lines on the track giving us a sense of the cars' lines, and a heads-up display offering information.

Yes, it looks like a video game, which reminds us of Jann's origin and way of thinking about the races, but as a result, little about the scenes looks and less about them feels real in any tangible sense. When there are real-world consequences to the racing, they're either presented as spectacle, such as a slow-motion crash, or so terrible, such as a fatal incident at one race, that we actually do start to wonder if the entire enterprise, which never stops coming across as a marketing stunt, is worth it.

All of this makes for a strange and hollow movie. Gran Turismo features the structure of a typical biography and sports story, but its core is fundamentally a multi-market piece of advertising. Ultimately, it's selling us on too much to convince us that the filmmakers primarily care about telling this story.

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