Gran Turismo

In Richard Hammond’s memoir On the Edge, he wrote, “All of us, each and every one, lives a life that is, in its own right, an epic.” Hammond, a television presenter most well-known for his work on the BBC’s Top Gear and subsequently Amazon’s The Grand Tour, wrote this line after his devastating car crash that almost claimed his life. In Gran Turismo, Jack Salter (played by Stranger Things fan favorite David Harbour), constantly reminds Jann Mardenborough (Madekwe) of the risks of race car driving, and lives in fear that his ultimate failure will result in his death, or that of another.


Gran Turismo is Chappie director Neill Blomkamp’s return to the big screen after over a dozen online shorts and 2021's sci-fi supernatural thriller Demonic. It's a biopic about Mardenborough: a real teenager who was offered the chance to become a professional race car driver based off his excellence in the racing stimulation video game of same name. Packing up his baggage, daddy issues and all, he leaves his life behind in Cardiff, Wales, to compete with fellow sim drivers to drive for Nissan and obtain his professional license to race for a living.

Gran Turismo coasts through Mardenborough’s trials with some ease, and the race to the finish line is sometimes on the predictable side. Yet there’s a clean kind of excitement watching Blomkamp’s direction of the races that somehow keeps the movie pedaling forward, a swift momentum that hits the right beats to make Mardenborough’s story an entertaining one.

A solid sports movie, after all, is often easy to get sucked into. Rags-to-riches stories are classic because it’s easy to keep rooting for the underdog, especially in a sport where money equates to success an obscene amount of the time. The stakes of racing keep it nail-biting, and Blomkamp does his best to inject that sense of adrenaline into Gran Turismo. For the most part it works – every race Mardenborough competes in is stimulating, with smooth camera movements and editing that propel each scene forward.

The dangers of racing are emphasized so often, though, that when Mardenborough finally finds himself in a horrific crash, the weight of the scene doesn’t stick as much as it should. There’s not an easy way to tastefully re-create an accident that claimed someone’s life, but Blomkamp does his best to showcase the emotional baggage Mardenborough carries with him after the wreckage. A solemn speech given by Salter gets our racer back on his feet, but Gran Turismo is too entrenched in its own PR stunt to dig deeper into the psychological effects such an accident might have had on Mardenborough.

Gran Turismo is perhaps a more basic film for Blomkamp, but a welcome reminder that his breakthrough first feature District 9 wasn’t a fluke. He manages to give a film that is more or less an ad for a video game a little bit of heart. He brings Mardenborough’s story to life, and it’s as sweet as it is thrilling, giving his victory of becoming a professional race car driver the epic treatment he deserves.