Gran Turismo is a movie that takes its name from one of the most famously meticulous racing simulators ever made. It is not really an adaptation of Sony’s world-beating racing sim — it is the true (though heavily embroidered) story of an esports driver Gran Turismo catapulted into real-world racing.
Despite the game it borrows its name from and the audience it’s trying to attract, it also doesn’t seem to know a damned thing about motorsport.
Gran Turismo loosely follows the true story of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), his meteoric rise from bedroom Gran Turismo open lobby grinder to real-world GT3 racing via the GT Academy program. He is recruited by the oily marketing guru Danny Moore (a character loosely based on The Race co-founder and CEO Darren Cox, played by Orlando Bloom). The crew of young drivers are all vying to win the GT Academy competition, the prize for which is a seat in a real Nissan-backed racing team. Jann is trained by Jack Salter (David Harbour), who is an entirely fictional character, as far as I can tell. Harbour does his best with a thin character — a trenchant bully for the film’s first hour who becomes an understanding mentor the instant Jann completes his GT Academy gauntlet.
What follows is a rapid run through Mardenborough’s early career, including his debut race at the Dubai 24 Hour and his GT3 campaign in 2012. The film then skips his stint in Formula 3 entirely, fast-forwarding to his first ever 24 Hours Of Le Mans. Certain real-world events — like Mardenborough’s freak crash on the Nurburgring Nordschleife that tragically killed one spectator — do make an appearance. However, the film picks and chooses the parts of Mardenborough’s story that it likes the best and discards the parts it doesn’t. Case in point: the film picks up the thread of racial inequality in motorsport once — and immediately puts it down, never to mention it again. Why pick it up if you aren’t going to do anything with it?
The answer is simple: Gran Turismo, as a film, has just one job — sell copies of Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation 5. The first half of the film is a flagrant, shameless ad for the game. Over and over, the script repeats how great Gran Turismo is and how it’s so realistic and a serious simulator, not a video game. It opens with a title card about the genius of GT creator Kazunori Yamauchi that makes it seem like he’s the main character of the film. He appears in a handful of scenes, played by actor Takehiro Hira. The film can’t even back up its own insistence that Gran Turismo is more than just a video game — in a sequence where a young Jann escapes some partycrashing cops in his dad’s clapped out Mazda, the film displays video game style ‘Cops Evaded’ graphics on screen as a joke.
The problem is, the Gran Turismo games have never displayed any message of the sort, and its players know that. Maybe the filmmakers were thinking of GTA instead of GT. I don’t know what the point of these graphics were. You just got done telling me for the ninth time in six minutes that Gran Turismo ISN’T a game, and here you are, equating it to a video game. Bizarre.
Once Jann moves out of the GT Academy program and into his racing career, the film’s fortunes do lift somewhat, settling into the beats of the middle-of-the-road American sports film that it is. The art of good racecraft should create the drama the film desperately needs all by itself, enough to carry it all the way to the chequered flag — and maybe it could if the film didn’t undermine itself again by throwing the racing rulebook out the window.
In one memorable sequence at Austria’s Red Bull Ring, Jann mounts a bold overtake on a rival driver. His rival takes the opportunity to shunt his car sideways into Mardenborough’s car. When Jann gets the overtake done, his rival tucks in behind, using his slipstream to pull in close and tap Jann’s bumper, sending him into a spin and off the race track.
If deliberate contact this blatant were to happen in real-world racing, that driver would be black-flagged, disqualified and probably dropped from their team. Quite apart from being disrespectful racing, it’s the kind of shithousery that could get someone killed, and there’s no room for it in the sport. The film’s response? A waved yellow flag — which means ‘slow down, possible hazard’ — and the race continues. Guy tries to kill another driver, and the stewards don’t even give him a penalty? Given the 12 post-race penalties imposed at the Red Bull Ring after this year’s Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix, this lack of punishment only further strains credulity.
These kinds of mistakes are found in every race sequence in the film, which will drive motorsport fans mad. Some of you reading this may counter: It’s a movie! It doesn’t have to follow the rules! My counter to your counter: If that’s true, they should have asked Xbox to adapt Forza Horizon instead. If the basis of your film is both an adaptation of the Gran Turismo brand, ‘the real driving simulator’, and the career of a real motorsports professional, then perhaps the real rules should be represented on screen. This is doubly true if you’re going to spend half the movie harping on and on about how realistic a simulator it is!
In the end, Gran Turismo is a far cry from the film it could have been. Though Mardenborough’s story is a great one, by turns tragic and inspirational, his biopic is reduced to a cog in a bigger marketing strategy. It’s a film consigned to death by a thousand studio notes and overbearing product placement.
Jann Mardenborough deserves better, this film’s cast deserves better, and Gran Turismo definitely deserves better.
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