The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D-
First, I want to mention that I had intended to see The Last Voyage of the Demeter on this particular week, but the only showtime for it at my local theater was at 10:30pm. I understand that it bombed at the box office, but perhaps its numbers would have been slightly better if theaters actually played it at times that people could see it. My consolation prize, and the only movie playing between 7:00 and 9:00 at a theater with fifteen frigging screens, was Gran Turismo. Grand.
I am utterly baffled by the reaction to this film. My theater was pretty crowded (it was opening night) and there were regular bursts of applause from the audience. I honestly thought that the applause was sarcastic and I was laughing along with everyone. But then I discovered that this movie has an A cinema score and 98% audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes and realized that, no, I wasn’t on the same page as the rest of that audience. That applause was genuine and that horrifies me. Not since Venom: Let There Be Carnage has a cinema experience left me wondering if I truly even belong on this planet anymore. I don’t care if this review makes me seem like an elitist, out-of-touch old bastard because Gran Turismo is garbage.
This is based on the video game series and also based on a true story. How the hell is that possible? Well, it is based on the true story of race car driver Jann Mardenborough. Apparently in 2011 Sony and Nissan sponsored a Gran Turismo (the video game) competition and best players got to participate in GT Academy, where they would learn how to drive real-life race cars. The highest-ranking person in the academy was then rewarded with an actual spot on an actual racing team. This is an actual thing that happened. This would sound stupid as a movie plot, but knowing that it actually happened really hammers home the notion that we, as a species, don’t have much time left.
The core problem here is that I’m supposed to be rooting for these people even though everything about this is horribly irresponsible. This dude should not have been put into a race car. This is the first time that I’ve ever been rooting for a corporate lawyer character to appear and end the plot through logical objection. Driving a race car is fucking hard. It isn’t something that you are good at because you are good at doing it in a video game. You might as well hold a Mortal Kombat championship and then put the winner in a UFC fight. Or take a Call of Duty champion and drop them off in a warzone. Those people would fucking die.
Well, to his credit, Jann Mardenborough didn’t die in real life. Good for him. The only person that died was the spectator that was hit by Mardenborough’s car when he lost control and crashed during a race in Germany. Again, that actually happened. That dude is fucking dead because of this competition. I know that people have died at races before, but it wasn’t the result of a fucking competition to boost video games sales. This is a dramatic point in the film where Mardenborough begins to lose his confidence and I’m supposed to be rooting for him to recover and get back in the driver’s seat? I mean, really? Fuck off, someone died and, not only am I not rooting for your comeback, I’m hoping that a frigging adult will finally show up and end this. No adult shows up and this all leads to the big final race at Le Mans, where he has to come in third place in order to stay on the circuit. That’s right, the big goal isn’t to win the race, but to finish in third. Riveting. Absolutely riveting.
To class things up, Gran Turismo also has the most obnoxious product placement I have ever seen in a film. There is not a surface, object or piece of clothing in this movie that isn’t covered in Sony and Nissan logos (and also Puma for some reason). Does that make some sense in the plot? Sure. Well, except for Puma. But there are ways to do these things without making your movie feel like a corporate training video. It also makes vast stretches of the film pretty damn boring from a visual perspective when every goddamn car is a white Nissan GT-R. You couldn’t have even made the cars different colors? Also, the GT-R starts at $120,000, so who the fuck are you selling this to? This movie is a 2+ hour commercial for video games I don’t like and cars that I can’t afford.
The only bright spot here is David Harbour as the lead trainer mainly because he is constantly talking about how this gig is beneath him and the entire idea is horribly irresponsible. I like to think that he wasn’t acting and that was actually Harbour’s commentary on this movie, but, either way, he is the only entertaining element of the film. That’s about all that I’ve got in terms of positive comments.
I’m sorry, but Gran Turismo isn’t a feel-good underdog story. It’s a story about greedy executives doing terribly irresponsible things and the fact that the film expects me to be on their side is downright ghoulish. Director Neill Blomkamp was once a promising director when he burst onto the scene in 2009 with District 9, but this is (hopefully) rock bottom for him. Gran Turismo is a misguided, overlong, ethically puzzling film that audiences will apparently love because the cars go vroom real fast.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Turismo_(film)#/media/File:GranTurismoMoviePoster.jpeg
