Gran Turismo review: Racing drama spins its wheels

While it’s been ripe for mockery on Twitter—sorry, X—Gran Turismo does have a basis in reality. Indeed, Sony lucked out here, having an actual story to attach to a story-less IP, and an aspirational one at that. After all, what gamer doesn’t want to think their hobby isn’t training them for something real and worthwhile? Yet for all its laborious efforts to throttle past expectations, Neill Blompkamp’s Gran Turismo is too unconfident, too distracted, too rote, and simply too short on gas to earn a place on the winner’s podium.

After a brief but bothersome prologue that insists repeatedly that the events depicted in the film actually happened—as if this is the first movie to be “based on a true story”—Gran Turismo introduces us to Jann Mardenborough, played by Archie Madekwe. In his performance, Madekwe’s palpable nerves aren’t because Jann has found the one thing he’s good at, and wants to pursue it for fame and fortune, but because racing may be the only thing he’s ever been good at. Ironically, this suspense feels underserved by the movie’s own logline. The real Mardenborough was a college dropout in 2011 when he tried out for the GT Academy, a now-defunct invitational where obsessives of PlayStation’s Gran Turismo racing simulation competed to sit behind wheels for real. Mardenborough wasn’t the only winner, but he remains its biggest success story. Thus, he has a movie, with a script credited to Zach Baylin and Jason Hall.

Reminiscent of his previous films like District 9 and memed-to-death Chappie, Blomkamp again utilizes an immersive verité camera that grounds Gran Turismo in a familiar reality. But the lack of details betray its period setting, something meticulous gamers not unlike Mardenborough himself will nitpick. Beyond recycling Gran Turismo UI onto live-action footage, sometimes hilariously, Blomkamp conceptualizes Mardenborough’s zen state into a symbiosis of gaming and racing, which he long ago mastered in his bedroom, on his own terms. To see it unfold is enough to temporarily suspend all doubt that Gran Turismo has what it takes to zoom past naysayers and join the likes of celebrated true-to-life racing dramas like Ron Howard’s Rush and James Mangold’s Ford V Ferrari.

Too bad it doesn’t. Gran Turismo overall feels misshapen and mangled, not unlike some of these cars after a few dozen laps. It doesn’t just speed, it breathlessly races from one set-piece race to the next, rendering Mardenborough’s unlikely journey into an incomprehensible dream. Incomprehensible not because it’s hard to believe an aimless gamer became a pro athlete, but because Blomkamp seems genuinely disinterested in telling a legible story with rhythm and timely execution. Gran Turismo isn’t Hell, but it is a purgatory loop where the majority of its characters, real or not, rarely exhibit authentic humanity. Instead, they come off like objects arranged in a music video edited by A.I.