Quick Synopsis: A player wins a series of Nissan-sponsored video game competitions through his gaming skills and becomes a real-life professional race car driver.

Yes, colloquially this is known as Gran Turismo, and if you tell people about it, you’re going to say “I saw Gran Turismo at the cinema”, but the official title (at least in UK markets) is Gran Turismo: Based On A True Story (or GT: BOATS, pronounced Git Boats). I say that now for two reasons: one is accuracy. The other is because it’s a stupid f*cking title. It’s a title that feels like it was decided by a committee with no idea how actual people talk. That sums up the experience of watching GT BOATS, to be honest. It has no emotion, no personality, it’s film as product and marketing rather than storytelling. There’s no actual humanity to the whole thing. It attempts it; the moment where Mardenborough crashes and kills a spectator is the closest the whole thing gets to showing genuine emotion. Fun fact; the crash did happen to the real Jann Mardenborough (who plays his character’s stunt double in this, which I thought was a nice touch). But it didn’t happen when he was training. In real life it happened four years into his career, in this, it is showcased as an event which motivated him to a podium finish. Some may say this is disingenuous, but Mardenborough wanted it in there, saying “It would have been a disservice for the audience for that not to be in there”. Would it? Would it really? Also, at the wish of sounding rude, that’s not your decision to make, yes you were injured, but someone else died. So unless you got permission from the family, then it feels kind of exploitative. Tbh, it feels that way in the film itself, even without the wider context. The fact that someone died is given away in dialogue that’s almost throwaway. The film seems to be saying: yes, somebody died, but look on the bright side, it inspired the lead character to win so it’s all good.

None of the faults of this film lies on the head of the performers btw. Archie Madekwe has a great screen presence and could have a good future ahead of him. David Harbour seems to be doing his best impression of Tough Enough Season 5 era Bill DeMott (just without the sexual and physical abuse). Orlando Bloom seems to be transitioning out of his heartthrob era, and I’m all for it. Not every performance is worth a positive comment though: Djimon Hounsou is completely wasted in such a small role, and he’s not helped by the fact he has to act alongside Geri Halliwell. Well, I say “act alongside”, it feels more like he’s acting against her, with her utterly dismal performance dragging him down with her. I’m sure her being married to the team principal of a Formula 1 team had nothing whatsoever to do with the choice to cast her. I kind of hope she was forced upon the production because I can’t bear to stand the idea that someone saw her performance and thought “Yup, she’s the best choice”.

It’s a shame I didn’t like this as it is an interesting story. Someone being chosen to join a race team because they were good at a video game is a fascinating story. But it shows its hand far too early. It’s so desperate to tell you how realistic the game is, that it never gives us any reason to doubt that he’s actually a good racer. There’s no “but will the skills be transferable?” conflict, he’s almost immediately very good. He goes through the training programme very quickly. Personally, I would have liked to have seen more of that. The section with the group of gamers training and being evaluated is the most interesting part of the film. Partly because there’s an interesting set of characters, all of whom are flawed but still likeable. They’re all in the same position, and from all over the world so you have a wealth of eclectic characters to work with. Instead, the film spends most of the time with the background characters being a group of spoiled rich dicks, but never focusing on or fleshing them out. They’re more annoyances than proper antagonists. The shift from “training camp” to “driving in Le Mans” also changes how some of the other characters are; they go from potential antagonists to helpful friends. It’s completely inconsistent and means we don’t really have much of a conflict. It’s all “Will he become a proper driver” when we know he will otherwise there’s no story. If he was working against somebody then at least they’ll be something there the audience can latch onto.

The lack of a compelling narrative might have been easy to ignore if it at least looked good. But it doesn’t. It looks too much like a video game, even when it’s not meant to. The scenes where it’s supposed to look like a video game are a weird choice. There are videogame style overlays over some of the races, to indicate how he sees the world. But it makes it seem TOO much like a video game. Having someone say “This isn’t a video game” and then making it seem exactly like a video game slightly undermines the message, somewhat. The races don’t look that exciting. There are too many close-ups of the internal machinery firing up etc, I’m sure for people who like cars it means something, but to everybody else, it just looks like small bits of metal and fire doing shit. There’s not even a decent soundtrack to the whole thing.