Gran Turismo Review

 

Gran Turismo is a biographical sports drama movie, based on the racing simulation of the same name. It's produced by Columbia Pictures, PlayStation Productions, and 2.0 Entertainment and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. Gran Turismo is written by Alex Tse, Jason Hall, and Zach Baylin and directed by Neill Blomkamp.

The story is Jann Mardenborough is a young man who dreams of becoming a professional racer. One day his dream comes true after winning a Nissan sponsored video game competition. He soon learns that the road to this dream will be a lot tougher than he imagined.

Why The Delay?

If any of you read my review for Room 237, then you should've gotten this review on Saturday. Sooo...what happened? Well, on Friday, mother nature decided to gift us a nice, lovely storm, which knocked out my wifi. So I had to wait until Saturday for it to come back. Which also meant pushing back this review. On well, on the bright side, this wasn't as bad as last time. Still pissed with Ohio Edison's reaction time on that one.

Initial Reaction

This was one of the many movies on my most anticipated list. At first, it was just because of the director they have [Neil Blomkamp], but after seeing the trailers, I became very interested in the overall story.

Cons

I've got nothing to say here. Move on.

Middle Ground

If there's one slight issue it was the pacing. Now 95% of the time, the movie breezes by fairly quick, than other 5% on the other, those are the moments where things feel slow and you're almost getting impatient wanting for the final race to get here.

Pros

One thing I enjoyed was the bits of humor. What made it work wasn't the feeling of the movie trying so hard, everything feeling like it was put on pause for the jokes, or an overabundance of jokes. It was used appropriately. The other aspect that made Gran Turismo quite the experience was the directing. I was very surprised by how Neil Blomkamp successfully stepped out of his sci-fi comfort zone to give us this movie. And his racing scenes were fantastic. If you liked the racing from something like Ford v Ferrari, then you'll get a kick out of this. I was liked how he used very video game-esque graphics and didn't make it look ridiculous. It was primarily used to telling us what place the racers were in, or used to get inside our main character's head. Which now brings me to one of two of the movie's biggest strengths, and that's the acting. Whether you like the movie or not, I think we can agree that performances are astounding. They're very grouded, real, and there was a lot of good chemistry throughout. The best one goes to David Harbour. He's basically playing a man who had his shot at going big, much like our main character, but due to a tragic event wanted to retire, and since then has become very cynical. And David never once misses a beat with this role. The last thing I'll give credit to is the story. Now yes, this is your typical underdog story, so you pretty much know where the story is going, before seeing it. So why didn't I put it up in the middle ground part? Because as I've stated quite a few times, that when writing a story you're pretty much gonna have no choice but run into certain tropes, it all depends on your execution. The execution here was really good, far better than what I was expecting. That's because the writers were not only being earnest about the movie they were writing, but still managed to get to the heart of said movie. We truly get to witness Jann's journey from being treated as joke because his a gamer, going through some very tough training, dealing with a horrific events, all in effort to truly go from gamer to racer just like the posters have stated.

While it's clearly Gran Turismo has issues, I found this to be a very crowd pleasing movie. I don't think critics really should be given this one such a mixed response.

My final rating is, Good.

So yeah, if by any chance you're curious about this, I recommend you give it a try. So, that's all for now. Come back on Monday, Sept 4th, for my Underrated Films review of 1977's Slap Shot. Apparently I'm going through a sports genre phase in my movie reviewing. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.