‘Gran Turismo’ Review: Neill Blomkamp’s Hyperkinetic Blast of Brand Extension

In 2009, Nissan teamed up with Sony for GT Academy, a reality TV show that posited a real-life Last Starfighter scenario: that the Gran Turismo series is such a finely tuned racing simulator that players who mastered the games could be trained to harness their skills to become actual professional racers. To the credit of all involved, that theory turned out to be true.

The focus of Neill Blomkamp’s Gran Turismo film is the true story of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), the biracial son of a retired British footballer who goes on to be GT Academy’s third and youngest winner. Jann’s journey into the professional racing world is marked by some very impressive, consistent highs and an extremely terrifying low, stemming from a major crash in 2015 that’s depicted in the film in pretty harrowing detail.

Despite being pretty cinematic on its own merits, this Gran Turismo still gooses up Jann’s story with bits of fiction. Written by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin, the film makes him the first GT Academy winner instead of the third. More significantly, it pairs him up with a grouchy, has-been luddite of a coach, Jack Salter (David Harbour), and plays up the “you’re just a gamer” adversity in order to make Jann even more of an underdog. Which translates to everyone from Jann’s parents (Djimon Hounsou and Geri Halliwell), to his pit crew, to his glad-handing corporate stooge of a sponsor (Orlando Bloom) telling him that he doesn’t belong.

There’s a strange conflict at work in the way that the film operates as a commercial for the Gran Turismo games themselves, with not one but two montages showing the development process for the games with all the intimacy of a Bridgerton sex scene, beckoning potential players in, while also showing them how the real thing would break them in half. But to its credit, and not unlike the race cars speeding around tracks at hundreds of miles per hour throughout, Gran Turismo is a film operating more on feeling and instinct than logic.

It helps that the film is well-grounded right at the outset, spending considerable time setting up Jann as a fundamentally good kid who finds out that his hobby could become his career and save him from the blue-collar purgatory that his father’s soccer career landed him in. It’s enough of a foundation that allows the whirlwind of events following the GT Academy to fly by as a series of hyperkinetic vignettes rather than a beat-for-beat retelling of Jann’s racing experience.

Blomkamp, post-District 9, has run into problems in terms of restraint, going too big, too fast, and forgetting why a story is interesting in the first place. Here, though, he’s been handed a narrative that invites such an approach. Gran Turismo’s core premise is predictable, and aside from a few amiable scenes that sketch in Jann and Jack’s friendship, Blomkamp refuses to let the film get too bogged down in the weeds building up drama at the expense of the races, the sheer fun of a gamer going big time, and the inherent adrenaline rush of a Grand Prix race.

What Gran Turismo lacks in connective tissue, it makes up for in sheer vibes, letting us revel in Jann’s joy as his star rises, slickly using UI elements from the games to keep the cohesion of every race, crash, and victory within the audience’s grasp. When the aforementioned major crash happens, the film pumps the brakes but keeps rolling, giving us the expected woe-is-me moment but using it to emphasize the difficulty of the job rather than break down our hero.

It’s a tricky feat that Blomkamp pulls off, though it isn’t without fault. For one, the script sets up a clear villain in Jack’s former racing team, led by Patrice Capa (a reliably scumbag-y Thomas Kretschmann), but never quite commits to putting them in Jann’s way. The impressive part, however, is how little it ends up mattering. To the extent that Gran Turismo is an adaptation of the games, it’s a film that doesn’t keep us waiting too long in the lobby to get back on the track.