RACE FOR GLORY: AUDI VS. LANCIA - Mark Reviews Movies

Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 4, 2024

Providing only the vaguest of glimpses into the world of rally racing and the minds of those who participate in it, Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia feels incomplete. How does such a thing happen?

Perhaps the filmmakers know too much about their subject, namely the feud between the racing teams of those car manufacturers in the subtitle at the 1983 World Rally Championship, and assume their audience will be nearly as knowledgeable about the topic. Maybe, as some closing text suggests, the rivalry and its players present a story too complex for a feature-length movie to fully explore. Whatever the case may be, it doesn't negate the fact that the filmmakers have failed to make a compelling or even a cohesive story out of material that seems fairly simple to communicate.

It is little more than a sports rivalry, after all. On one side, there's Cesare Fiorio (Riccardo Scamarcio), the manager of Italian auto manufacturer Lancia's racing team. The brand is struggling to produce and sell cars, leading to a scene of ingeniously "creative" accounting that involves Fiorio distracting somebody with lunch while workers transport cars from one lot to another, in order to make it appear as if there are 200 of them instead of a little more than a hundred. It's an amusing sequence, although one has to wonder why co-writer/director Stefano Mordini bothers to include it, considering how the movie's relatively short run time might have been better spent establishing the central point of the narrative.

What we come to understand, on only a foundational level, is that Fiorio is obsessed with winning. We know that, because the screenplay—written by the director and the star with Filippo Bologna—repeatedly has the man say exactly that or some variation of it on multiple occasions—to his drivers, to the company's upper management, to a mechanic, to a reporter, played by Haley Bennett, whose scenes seem to exist outside of time and space in order for Fiorio to establish and re-establish that he really, really wants to win. The screenplay is so hastily structured that the fact Fiorio has a family only comes from a scene with his son's birthday party happening in the background.

His opponent is German car company Audi's racing team, led by manager Roland Gumpert (Daniel Brühl). What we learn of that man is that he existed, developed four-wheel drive for racing cars, and, if the movie is any indication, was quite skilled at the classic intimidation tactic of the stare-down. The whole plot boils down to the competition between these two men, by way of their cars and their drivers, but the characters and narrative are so thin and hollow that the filmmakers only provide the broad concept of conflict between them.

The other major human conflict here is between Fiorio and his star driver Walter Röhrl (Volker Bruch), who agrees to race for Lancia after some mild convincing from the manager. In Fiorio's opinion, Walter is the only one who can drive the team's light, speedy car and compete with Audi's four-wheel-drive precision. Walter comes into and goes out of the competition on apparent whims, though, for reasons that are never made clear and just seem attempts to generate suspense where there really isn't any.

The racing scenes, which theoretically are the core of that conflict, aren't much better. The championship amounts to a series of races across Europe, but without any explanation of how the competition works, it almost feels as if the stakes are being made up as the story progresses. Gumpert's team wins one race, but that's fine, because Fiorio's team can just win the next.

That's the case with this particular competition, of course, but the problem is that the filmmakers don't explain the full structure or the standings of the competition at the start or at any time over the course of the story. We're just left to speculate about the general stakes of any given race, and since all that's shown of those specific races is an isolated stretch of or a single event from it, it's not as if there's any visceral excitement to be found in the racing sequences, either.

Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia breezes past anything of intrigue—the characters, their philosophy on winning, the potentially fatal consequences of chasing it (Katie Clarkson-Hill plays the team's nutritionist, whose father died racing decades ago and who knows the cost too well, but she barely figures into this)—or enticement—particularly the seemingly random quality of the racing scenes. It's in such a hurry to tell the basics of this story that one could argue the movie barely accomplishes that goal.

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