Gran Turismo tells the (mostly) true story of plucky gamer Jann Mardenborough (Midsommar's Archie Madekwe), who parlayed his preternatural talents in the titular PlayStation racing game — honed over thousands of hours of playtime — into real-world podium placement. The film depicts him as an aimless uni dropout most at home in front of the virtual racing wheel, doted on by his mum (Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell) and gently encouraged by his ex-footballer dad (Djimon Hounsou, Hollywood's go-to sentiment machine) to pursue grander ambitions than stagnation at the virtual race course. Thank heavens for Orlando Bloom's Danny Moore, then, an endlessly animated — like the world's tryhardiest TED talker — Nissan exec, who offers Jann a route to IRL racing stardom: a competition pitting the best of the world's Gran Turismo players in the world against each other for a chance to race for realsies.
And so the action is transposed from the Cardiff suburbs to Silverstone, for a half-hour-or-so boot camp sequence evocative of one the great Dad Movies, Top Gun, only rainier. (There's even an annoyingly charismatic, and devilishly handsome, rival for Jann to contend with for the top spot, though the homoeroticism is disappointingly dialled down.) David Harbour also enters the fray as an irascible ex-racer, Jack Salter, whose job is to teach the prospective racers how to do it in the real world. This is an utterly impossible task, as far as he's concerned, which he conveys to this troupe of teenage twerps whenever he can, barking their ineptitude at them like a drill sergeant.
The young lead and coming-of-age sensibilities — this kid triumphing against the odds to become, by the end, a pretty good racer as far as the movie is concerned, and finding his place in the world in the process — would suggest it's aimed at, well, teenagers. But Jann is no ordinary twenty-something. He's quite chronically uncool, and daddishly awkward. The movie builds a framing device out of his extremely middle-aged pre-race ritual, which is the most dad-like of anxiety killers not delivered in an orange pill bottle: to calm down his nerves, he listens to a pair of '80s bangers, Enya's ethereal “Orinoco Flow” and Kenny G's sax ballad “Songbird” at tinnitus volume, humming away contentedly. He might as well have his slippers up on the sofa. Rounding off the symphony of Dad Hits that form the score of Gran Turismo, Harbour's character listens exclusively to “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath, which is perhaps the biggest Dad Rock anthem of all time.
Gran Turismo is a Dad Movie through and through. You'd have to go so far as to say it's the most polo shirt and New Balance-wearing flick this side of Oppenheimer, and only second to it in this year's hierarchy of Dad Movies. Historical biopics are always going to be the Dad Movie go-to, after all. But what comes after reruns from the History Channel? Sports dramas, naturally — and racing flicks are preferable, if boxing bouts aren't an available choice. Look down the list of sport film clichés that dads are attracted to like pit crews to a wonky tyre, and you'll find them all here: it centres on an underestimated, underachiever of an underdog, who goes on to find greatness (see: Rocky); it zips from exotic locale to exotic locale, many of which are in Europe (or, appropriately for an adaptation of a Sony property, Japan), like director Neil Blomkamp is chucking darts at a map and hitting the most familiar Bond settings; sexy supercars that go neeeowwww, and vroom!. It's Ford vs. Ferrari with a drive-thru's worth of corporate merchandising. It's Days of Thunder with David Harbour.
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You have to have Dad money, anyway, to afford all of the merchandise Gran Turismo chucks at you like debris from a nasty car crash. Every second scene has a PlayStation logo in it, somewhere. A crucial bonding moment between Jann and Jack comes when the former gifts his mentor a digital Sony Walkman — an upgrade from his analog ‘80s tape player, which could be a subliminal holdover from Harbour’s time on Stranger Things — which is the first time anyone in planet Earth has seen a Sony Walkman since woolly mammoths roamed the icy tundras. There's no mistaking who this movie is really targeted towards: older, male viewers who both have a stomach for unfettered corporatism and might actually fancy adding expensive toys like PlayStation racing wheels to their game rooms once they get home. Who squirrels away silly gadgets like that, anyway, at such a rate as dads, as if they're preparing for the world's biggest car boot sale?
There's only one appropriate way to watch Gran Turismo, which is Dad Style: stood in front of the screen, hands crossed behind your back, like you're just catching a scene or two before you nip down to B&Q. Our apologies to the rest of the audience.
