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Gran Turismo Movie Review

Gran Turismo is a 2023 sports drama film directed by Neill Blomkamp and starring Archie Madekwe. It is an overlong, but reasonably diverting flick.

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“If you miss a line in the game, you reset.

You miss it on the track, you could die“

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The flick tells the true story of a team of unlikely underdogs – a working-class gamer, a former race-car driver and an idealistic motorsport executive – who risk it all to take on the most elite sport in the world. There was so much missed opportunity in this film that always took the most conventional and boring storytelling route.

It could have explored the relationship between gaming and sports and how the two can interact with each other meaningfully, but it never did that unfortunately. In fact, for a film based on a video game series, we never got to properly explore the racing game genre and how it can function as a jumping board into the sport of racecar driving itself.

Gran Turismo is quite entertaining, there is no question about that. It is also exceptionally well made with Neill Blomkamp delivering his best directorial effort in quite a while. The directing and editing are slick, the acting performances are uniformly competent and the movie’s racing scenes were thrilling and superbly executed. The final race was particularly fun to watch and expectedly chaotic and intense.

My main issue with the movie is its lack of restraint. This type of simplistic story would have fared much better with a 90-minute runtime, but at over two hours it felt bloated and honestly quite tiring, and a racing movie should never make you feel that. It once again showcased the ridiculous tendency of most filmmakers these days to make ridiculously long movies that stand in stark contrast to their narratives that are almost never ambitious enough to warrant such excess.

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