Gran Turismo

Gran Turismo tells the true story of Jann Mardenborough, a gamer who dreams of being a professional race car driver.

Gran Turismo, developed by Kazunori Yamauchi and Polyphony Digital, is the most accurate racing simulator ever created. First released in 1997, its latest iteration is Gran Turismo 7, which was released last year.

Back to the movie — Jann Mardenborough is a Welsh teenager trying to figure out what to do with his life. Rather, he knows what he wants to do with his life, his father just thinks it’s unattainable. His father won’t stop going on about how Jann should be more like his brother and put his effort into something more practical, like football (soccer).

This nagging turns into an ultimatum: two weeks to turn things around, or Jann has to go back to the drawing board and figure out something else. Luckily for Jann, his father’s ultimatum coincides with a contest: the top Gran Turismo players in the world are invited to qualify for an academy where they will learn if they have what it takes to be a real racer. The person who wins a final race at the academy will be signed to Nissan’s racing team.

Essentially, this movie was “Ford v. Ferrari” for gamers. That’s not saying it was bad, just that the racing elements in the two movies were similar. It would’ve been better if the other gamers Jann competed against got more screen time — more compelling to see how everyone fared in the competition and not just “Oh, okay, they’re not there anymore. They didn’t make it through to the next round.”

Most affected by the way the competition played out in the film was Mariano González, who plays Henry Evas. He’s only in the movie for 5-10 minutes tops with one line of dialogue and then he’s just gone. Surprisingly, however, he doesn’t really have an accent when speaking English. Originally from Argentina, González began his acting career on Disney’s O11NCE, a Latin American series about students who attend a school devoted to sports as well as academics. And he sounds the same speaking Spanish in that show as he does speaking English in this movie.

The end of the movie was really satisfying. And of course there were some fun facts about the real Jann Mardenborough as the credits rolled. One of them being that he was actually one of the stunt doubles for the film.