Gran Turismo races its way into a good video game movie adaptation.

Score: 4/5

Gran Turismo is by all accounts, just another underdog story. If you have seen one, you have loosely seen them all. An unknown protagonist gets a shot to compete at a professional level, encounters an obstacle, perseveres through said obstacle, and triumphs in the end. This movie’s unique angle is that this is a true story about a contest that took the best video game players of the game Gran Turismo and found the best of the best to get trained and sponsored to race at the professional level. It’s a crazy idea and it actually worked. It could have rested on that and been an okay movie but what set this one apart from the dozens of other movies just like this were two things: Actor David Harbour, and the execution of presenting the danger in racing cars.

First up the cast as a whole is serviceable, but it’s Lead Mechanic Jack Salter, played by David Harbour, that carries this movie to the finish line. Sure, there is a slightly wacky salesman with Orlando Bloom’s Danny Moore, who is amusing at moments, but it’s Harbour that doesn’t just deliver some humor but gives this movie a beating heart. It’s crucial for this movie. Archie Madekwe’s Jann Mardenborough may be the racer that this movie follows but it just wouldn’t work without this mentor navigating the novice racer to the realities of how difficult and deadly racing professionally can be. I do want to give Madekwe praise on a very touching moment with his Djimon Hounsou playing Jann’s father Steve. The scene hit me in all the right ways emotionally. Back to Harbour though, his character starts as someone who doesn’t believe in this program, but changes heart as the movie plays on, and ends up being the perfect person to help Jann navigate through the worst moments any driver can experience. It’s good stuff.

The other piece that worked so well for me was the production’s ability to make me feel extremely tense as if I was trying to win this race. Director Neill Blomkamp of District 9 fame does an excellent job always keeping the viewer in the race. It feels thrilling, but also frightening. This was a kid who was used to driving in a game where he could just restart if things went bad, but in real life you mess up, you are lucky if you don’t die. This movie does not shy away from that fact with some intense car crashes that show what Jann actually did in real life was all the more impressive.

If there was one thing that took me out of the movie a couple times was some of the choices used to splice in video game graphics or visualizations of a virtual car, or a car becoming a video game racecar controller setup. Some of it worked, like with a fun chime, or indicators to show what position Jann was in, but this was probably the one area that I wish there was just a bit more restraint. This movie is very much trying to be taken seriously, and it didn’t need the more over-the-top presentation moments in my opinion.

In a year with some massive success stories for video game adaptations, it would have been easy to write off Gran Turismo, but the team at Sony nailed this one. Sure, it’s not The Last of Us, but it’s still a pretty good movie, video game adaptation or not.