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GRAN TURISMO ★★
(M) 135 minutes
Going by Hollywood’s hits and misses since the start of the year, we’re in for an avalanche of product-based product: toy cinema, video game cinema, sportswear cinema. Occupying pole position this week is the sports drama Gran Turismo, directed by South Africa’s Neill Blomkamp: a feature-length plug for Nissan and for the bestselling video game series the film is named after, launched on the Sony PlayStation in 1997.
Archie Madekwe (left) plays a gamer who becomes a real-life racing car driver, while David Harbour plays his mentor in Gran Turismo.
Correction – what we’re talking about isn’t a video game but a “driving simulator”. Or so says Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a skinny, soft-spoken university dropout from the north of England who spends every available moment in his bedroom setting records on the virtual track, insisting to his disbelieving father Steve (Djimon Hounsou) this will somehow help him achieve his dream of becoming a racing driver for real.
If there’s anything we’ve learnt from fairy tales and Hollywood movies alike, it’s that any sufficiently irrational belief is bound to be vindicated. Jann’s fairy godparent appears in the form of smarmy Nissan marketing man Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom, astutely cast), who laments young people have abandoned driving in favour of texting in Ubers.
His lateral solution to this dilemma is the GT Academy, an international competition for gamers – sorry, “e-sports competitors” – where the winner will receive training and the opportunity to enter races in the material world.
Back in our reality, a similar brainwave was the premise for a six-season reality TV show, with the actual Mardenborough competing in season three (according to the film’s closing caption, he was also a stunt driver for Madekwe). But Blomkamp and his writers keep it simple, focusing tightly enough on Jann that we’re never in doubt of him being the movie’s Chosen One.
Indeed, blurry backgrounds define the visual aesthetic, reflecting the hero’s psychological tunnel vision and the physical experience of travelling at high speed (as well as concealing any incongruities in the mostly Hungarian locations).
The foreground drama concerns Jann’s search for an appropriate male mentor, with the Goldilocks zone between the scowling Steve and the overly smiley Danny occupied by his trainer Jack Salter (David Harbour), a tough-but-fair cynic who ultimately has to concede that, yes, the kid has guts.
One puzzle is why original Gran Turismo designer Kazunori Yamauchi (Takehiro Hira) isn’t more prominently featured, considering the whole enterprise serves as a test of his game’s accuracy as a simulator.
What the film wants to say about the relation between simulation and reality also isn’t entirely clear: if there’s little functional difference, why bother risking physical injury and death?
Following the same logic, watching a movie could be seen as a pale substitute for competing in a real race or a simulated one. But for those stuck in third gear, Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo at least offers the chance to dream of being somewhere else.
Gran Turismo is released in cinemas on August 10.
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