Film Review: ‘Gran Turismo’ Gets Stuck in First Gear

Printer-friendly versionE-mail page to friendPDF version

CHICAGO – “Gran Turismo” uses the life story of a gamer named Jann Mardenborough to get its message across … he was a college dropout in the UK who used the hours spent behind the steering wheel in his bedroom to become a real race car driver. While the racing scenes deliver the goods, this poorly conceived piece of product placement never gets its narrative out of first gear. 


Rating: 1.5/5.0

It is a novel approach, but sometimes his story threatens to get drowned out by seemingly incessant plugs for the driver simulator videogame Gran Turismo and a certain Japanese auto company. The film starts with Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) as a marketing exec who comes up with the idea of using the GT game as a way of appealing to the next generation of car buyers. So he recruits the top gamers in the world to attend an auto racing boot camp to see if they can hack it on the real track … and he enlists former racer and lovable grump Jack Salter (David Harbour) to oversee the recruits and whip them into shape.

Continue reading for Spike Walter’s full review of “Gran Turismo”

Gran Turismo
Photo credit: Sony Pictures Releasing

Continue reading for Spike Walter’s full review of “Gran Turismo”