Jann Mardenborough parlayed video game skills into a racing career at GT Academy, but the movie version of his story feers off track. In theaters Aug. 25.
A little way into the movie Gran Turismo, the unlikely brand extension of Sony’s sim racing games accidentally satirizes itself. “This whole thing is a marketing extravaganza!” excitable auto executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) shouts at salty racing coach Jack Salter (David Harbour). They’re aboard a helicopter wheeling above a racetrack, where Salter’s students in the GT Academy — a real-life program intended to turn players of Sony’s Gran Turismo games into actual racing drivers — are being put through their paces. The helicopter is an absurd bit of theater for the TV cameras, and Salter knows it. But he’s powerless to resist the marketing apparatus around him.
So are the people behind the Gran Turismo movie. The familiar phrase “based on a true story” is slathered all over its marketing — in some cases, even presented as part of the film’s official title. That awkward straining for legitimacy echoes throughout the film. In a year when confident, authentic video game adaptations have risen to the top of the heap both in theatrical release and on television, and Greta Gerwig has turned cinema-as-sponcon into a multifaceted art form, Sony’s movie brings us crashing back down to Earth.
Directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9 and Elysium director, tech innovator, and wannabe video game creator), Gran Turismo is a broad, trashy, true-ish sports drama that has a lot less in common with The Last of Us or The Super Mario Bros. Movie than it does with triumph-of-the-brand advertorial like Air, Ben Affleck’s biography of a sneaker. Its closest cousin is Tetris, Apple’s retelling of Nintendo’s tussle with the Soviet Union over the marketing rights to the classic puzzle game. Just like Tetris, Gran Turismo solves the conundrum of how to adapt a game without any characters: by unearthing a compelling human story behind it. And just like Tetris, it strays pretty far from both truth and plausibility in its overcooked take on real-life events — then self-consciously frames those events with video game-y graphics, to remind everyone of their unreal inspiration.
Gran Turismo is a fictionalized account of the rise of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a British teen who dreamed of being a racing driver as he played racing games in his bedroom, then made that dream into a reality. In 2011, he won the GT Academy’s top prize: a contract to drive for a real Nissan motorsports team. Since then, he built a reasonable career as a pro: He raced in the 24 Hours of Le Mans several times, and went on to compete in Japan’s Super GT series.
The movie compresses, reorders, and massages the details of his story until they (a) resemble the tried-and-true beats of a sports biopic, and (b) serve the needs of the production’s marketing partners. After all, it wouldn’t do to show Mardenborough practicing on a period-appropriate PlayStation 3 rather than a modern-era PS5, or driving open-wheel Formula 3 cars around dreary British motordromes instead of racing a branded Nissan around glitzy Abu Dhabi.
