My least favorite sport is bowling.  It is a shame, too, because my sister was a pretty good bowler in high school.  It is also a fun social activity.  Because of my distaste for the mundanity and repetitiveness of lining up the pins, knocking them over, and doing it all over again, I prefer to just sit next to the lanes and chat.  Besides, I get too competitive when I engage in athletic activities, making me get frustrated when I lose.  Motor racing is a close second for me.  Here is a sport, if it can be called that, where your average fan cannot participate on their own, at least not without risking a jail sentence.  Most others you can do in your free time and thus relate to the stars for which you cheer, even if your skill level is not at a professional level.  Along these same lines, what I find even more boring is watching others play video games.  I do not mind playing myself.  Yet, to see others do it has never captured my attention.  If you combine these things, sans the bowling, you get Gran Turismo.  These are the perspectives I brought into my viewing.

Gran Turismo begins with a few minutes about how the video game of the same name that provides the genesis for the movie was developed.  It ends there as well, so convenient, I guess.  I suppose this is offered as a way of explaining why the interest in this “racing simulator” is so widespread.  Among its millions of avid fans is Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe).  He is a young man growing up in Cardiff, Wales, who would rather spend his time indoors immersed in the eponymous title than playing football (that is soccer to us Yanks) with his dad, Steve Mardenborough (Djimon Hounsou). Steve thinks his son is wasting his time, while Jann sees himself as pursuing his dreams of being a professional racer.  Another dreamer is Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), a marketing executive for Nissan.  He comes up with the idea of creating an academy to train gamers like Jann to become members of the Nissan racing team.  Nissan agrees to his proposal, but want to make sure that the potential risks are minimized, since they would be putting basically kids behind the wheels of supercharged race cars.  The person he turns to for this task is Jack Slater (David Harbour).  Jack is a one-time driver turned mechanic, but he is currently working with a different team.  Seeing their arrogance, especially from their lead racer, Nicholas Capa (Josha Stradowski), he decides to leave that group and take Danny’s offer.  After a near run-in with the police, Steve is making Jann work in the rail yard with him in order to teach his son a lesson about where the young man’s life will be headed unless he changes his attitude.  It only makes Jann more determined to make it to a local gaming center where he is to compete in the contest to qualify for Nissan’s academy.  He wins, of course, but now he must defeat the others who qualified.  Jack does not make it easy.  He does not believe bringing in people who are used to simulations is going to bring him anybody worth putting at the wheel.  Accordingly, he turns it into a demanding training course, where people from a few different countries have to not only learn to operate a vehicle with that kind of speed, but also have to be able to handle the physical demands.  They begin with ten, but any little error could mean they are told to leave.  It comes down to a final race of five, with Matty Davis (Darren Barnet) emerging as his main rival.  Their finish comes down to milliseconds between them, and Danny favors giving the victory to what he sees as the more marketable Matty.  Because Jack has become a believer in Jann, Jack’s opinion wins the day and Jann is given the opportunity to become a part of team Nissan.  I say opportunity because Jann’s task is just beginning.  He has six races in which he has to finish in fourth place or better in order to get a professional contract.  His main antagonist on the track is Nicholas, who does not think a gamer belongs in his world.  Nonetheless, Jann gets the right position on the sixth race.  With victory comes the spoils, in this case finally working up the nerve to invite Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) to come to be with him in Japan when he signs his deal.  From here, it should be a matter of settling into a career as a professional driver.  However, in his first race in this role, he has what is called a “freak accident.”  Coming over a small incline, a bit of wind gets under the car and the vehicle goes tumbling into a group of spectators, killing one.  He is devastated when he finds out, despite nobody blaming him for what happened.  It takes a personal revelation from Jack, who relates a similar incident that led him to quit racing, to convince Jann to get back into a race car.  Unfortunately, Danny informs him that Nissan will only continue to support Jann if he gets “on the podium” (meaning that he needs to finish either first, second, or third) in his next event.  To make it even harder, it will be at Le Mans, a track that holds a twenty-four-hour race.  With this kind of set-up, Nissan brings back two of Jann’s academy mates, including Matty, to form the trio who will drive their car.  With a healing moment with dad, and some inspiration from Jack, Jann is in the car for the final leg of this grueling competition.  As with Matty before, Jann beats out Nicholas by a fraction at the end to earn third place.  There is a big celebration before we are treated to some pictures of the real-life Jann Mardenborough before the credits roll.

In the introduction to Gran Turismo, I noted how little enjoyment I derive from watching people play video games. Throughout the movie, they liken what Jann does to the experience of being at the controls of the simulator.  Now, I do not wish to seem like the old fuddy-duddy here, but none of this seems terribly interesting to me.  As I mentioned, I will play video games, but the ones I enjoy are of a different ilk.  I am also aware that there is a small legion of people out there who are dedicated to the eponymous video game and all its sequels.  Again, there is nothing wrong with being into such things.  Some think of it as an addiction, though there are far worse things with which to be obsessed.  It would also seem that the early reviews of the film, based solely on the Rotten Tomatoes scores, are largely positive.  That is why I focused on the things I did in the introduction.  Unless you are into either racing as a sport, or the video game specifically, I do not know what this film has to offer you.  To be fair, there are some aspects of it that are objectively good from a filmmaking perspective.  I guess this is why a sizable portion of the critics gave it a plus rating.  Either way, for me, there is no getting around the long stretches of just seeing cars going really fast in what amounts to a circle.  The movie does its best to make this exciting, but it is diminished for me by a lack of interest in the subject matter, and the predictable outcome.

Still, I will build Gran Turismo back up a little with my Catholic thoughts.  What struck me about Jann is his commitment to his calling to be a race car driver.  It speaks to the nature of a calling from God.  Because our relationship with the Divine is meant to be deeply personal, often it is something that only the individual can see.  I can speak from personal experience of trying to describe to another the direction in which God is pulling me.  Indeed, you will have those that will tell you that you are crazy, or try to convince you that you will fail.  This can even come from family members as we see with Jann and Steve.  They may mean well, but they can also be an impediment to fulfilling the purpose God has for you.  This is detrimental in your spiritual growth.  Along these lines, when you have that way forward before you, you have to commit to it.  This is an aspect of Jann’s journey that he struggles with early on at the academy.  He is trying to pass somebody on the track, but hesitates at the decisive moment.  God’s directives are not half measures.  This may sound like the ravings of a fanatic, but Church history has more people of a more serene disposition than those of the fire and brimstone nature.  There are many metaphors I could give you for describing this sort of thing, but the important part is that you understand that the pursuing of a goal, be it racing or following God’s call, takes a full measure of determination.  This is my biggest take away from the film.

Again, if you are into racing and video games, then Gran Turismo is the movie for you.  If not, then it is nothing that you have not seen in almost any other sports film.  I think the makers of it were banking on the fact that it features something unique in making a gamer into a professional race car driver.  However, this, too, seems to not have been all that unique since Jann Mardenborough was the third person to achieve this feat, not the first as you are led to believe.  There also appears to be some other historical inaccuracies.  This all makes for a mixed bag for me.