‘Gran Turismo’

After being told his entire life -- and many, many additional times in the first third of the movie -- that video game sim-racing isn't at all the same as the real deal, the first thing "Gran Turismo" ubergamer Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) tells himself when he gets behind the wheel of a real racing car, about to compete for a spot on an actual, in real life, racing team, is just the opposite: "It's just a game," he says to himself, like a mantra. Nothing he hasn't seen countless times before, in other words, having put thousands of hours in front of his monitor screen running these tracks as simulations.

In this fact-based story set in 2011, Jann gets to take part in a promotion from Nissan, helmed by marketing whiz Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), where, among nine other gaming competitors, he's invited to Nissan's sponsored GT camp, where he gets a shot at true immortality that most "Gran Turismo" game devotees (who are legion) can only dream about. Led by irascible head instructor Jack Salter (David Harbour), the prospective drivers are treated with outright disdain by the pit crews, mechanics, and other, already established racers, not the least of which is Salter himself, who informs them on their first day that he doesn't actually believe any of them can make it.

Facing such scorn and derision is nothing new for Jann, however, whose former professional football-playing father (Djimon Hounsou), and younger, football-mad brother Coby (Daniel Puig), have always ridiculed his obsession with "Gran Turismo," the painfully accurate racing simulator created by former Japanese racer Kazunori Yamauchi (Takehiro Hira). Given a shot, at last, to prove everyone wrong, Jann has a chance to right seemingly all the wrongs in his life at once, as long as he's able to keep winning, all the way to earning his F1A license, and being able to compete with Europe's finest professional racers.

At the camp, he meets a gaggle of fellow sim-racers, including, naturally, an arrogant American jerkwad named Matty Davis (Darren Barnet), who lords over the others his supposed superiority. To keep with the theme, once Jann actually makes the tour, he is often bedeviled by the uber-smooth Dutch driver Nicholas Capa (Joshua Stradowski), Salter's former employer, who seems to make it his life's mission to keep Jann from the winners circle.

Based as it is on a real story (with the real Jann serving as his character's stuntman), it's fair to give the film a bit of latitude as to its crowd-pleasing predilections, but as a Sony/Columbia film, concerning a PlayStation game, and serving its corporate backers like the ubiquitous patches on a pro-driver's uniform, the proceedings come across more than a little self-serving. It's as if McDonald's were making a bio-pic about Mayor McCheese.

Given that limitation, and the sense that the film -- similar to a recent pink-hued blockbuster concerning a Mattel toy -- more or less only exists for its vibrant product placement (alongside Sony, we also feature multiple car brands, Moet & Chandon, and Black Sabbath, among others), and, more to the point, for its considerable branding efforts therein. Naturally, "GT" the game gets dapped up, but also the good, hard-working folks at Nissan, with major shout outs to Le Mans -- in this film, serving more or less like the "Rach 3" piano concerto from "Shine" -- among others. In this way, it's so incredibly self-aggrandizing, the film should come with a warning label.

Even so, despite its paint-by-numbers, rise-and-fall-and-rise sports narrative, Madekwe, a gangly young man whose charm is infectious, plays nicely off the affably stern Harbour, who acts the hell out of a role he could just as easily have mailed in. So committed to his performance, in fact, that Harbour almost single handedly raises the ceiling on this infomercial-esque contraption. Needless to say, for lovers of "GT" itself, or racing in general, there are thrills aplenty from the (seemingly endless) series of matches, with director Neill Blomkamp -- some distance from his usual sci-fi entreaties -- doing everything in his considerable power to make these races seem compelling.

You can expect a hyper-stream of quick cuts, from the drivers' faces, their feet on the pedals, the cars furiously bearing down on each other, the inner workings of the engines themselves, the well-oiled pistons firing out, and the flashing explosions of the spark plugs lighting up like fireworks.

These, along with longer shots of the cars racing against one another -- along with helpful arrows pointing out Jann's car amid the vehicular mayhem of the track -- and graphics depicting everything from the racers' pace, to the number of laps remaining, and many swooping drone shots of everything flying past as the camera loops past the thronging hoards in the grandstands back down to the track, gives a sense of the thrill of being in one of these gravity-bound rockets as it tears up the asphalt.

In this way, the film goes down relatively smoothly, albeit blunt as a mallet to the skull, even as it never lets us forget for a second the corporation behind it all. It's certainly not breaking any new ground, but as an adaptation of an epic, real-life gamer chronicle, it at least makes it off the track in one piece.

82Cast: David Harbour, Orlando Bloom, Archie Madekwe, Darren Barnet, Geri Halliwell Horner, Djimon Hounsou, Takehiro Hira, Daniel Puig, Joshua Stradowski

Director: Neill Blomkamp

Rating: PG-13

Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

Playing theatrically

    “It’s only a game”: Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) receives counsel from Nissan racing team head instructor Jack Salter (David Harbour) in “Gran Turismo.”