Paid product placement has been around since the dawn of cinema but 2023 may just go down in history as the Year of the Full Product Movie. Earlier this year we had AIR and TETRIS, and BARBIE is still breaking box office records; now we have GRAN TURISMO, which is, essentially, a two-hour advertisement for Sony PlayStation’s hugely popular game, er, racing simulator, as the story repeatedly reminds audiences. Like AIR and TETRIS, GRAN TURISMO is an underdog tale based on a true story, with the word “true” being applied very loosely.

GRAN TURISMO tells the story of Nissan Motors’ idea to take gamers, put them behind the wheel of real racing cars and pit their skills against real drivers on the track. After Nissan Europe marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom, the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and LOTR franchises) gets the green light from the suits at corporate HQ in Japan to create the GT Academy, an AMERICAN IDOL-type program designed to find the best unknown racing talent out there, he recruits washed up racer-turned-mechanic Jack Salter (David Harbour, VIOLENT NIGHT; BLACK WIDOW) to whip the recruits into shape. One of those recruits is Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe, MIDSOMMAR), who is the best GT gamer in Cardiff, Wales. Though his former pro footballer father, Steve Mardenborough (Djimon Hounsou, the SHAZAM! films), thinks the young man is wasting his time, Jann is determined to prove everyone in the racing world wrong, including Salter, who is the Academy’s version of Simon Cowell.

It seems to be commonplace these days for films to say they’re “based on a true story” when, in fact, only the bare bones of the story are true. That’s the case here with GRAN TURISMO. While there is a Jann Mardenborough who graduated from the GT Academy and went on to have a career in professional racing, little else about this story is true. For starters, Jann was the Academy’s third winner, not the first. While that might seem trivial, it’s the difference between Kelly Clarkson and Fantasia Barrino, although to be fair, he is the Academy’s biggest success story so far. Perhaps the most egregious of liberties taken, however, is Mardenborough’s spectacular crash at Nürburgring in 2015. Here, writers Jason Hall and Zach Baylin shift the timeline of the event back by a few years, turning it into a “get back in the saddle” moment that propels the young man to success on the podium at Le Mans… in the movie. (In real life, his team came in third.) The families of the people who died or were injured that awful day must be furious and disgusted. I know I would be.

Insensitivity and playing loosey-goosey with the facts aside, GRAN TURISMO fails to do the one thing Sony no doubt wanted to have happen when it agreed to this project: It doesn’t make you want to run out and buy the latest version of the game, er, racing simulator. Director Neill Blomkamp (DISTRICT 9) devotes scant little time showing audiences the product in use, instead focusing on a generic underdog racing story that never reaches full throttle. While Blomkamp does employ little nods and winks to the racing simulator as the real cars zip and jostle around the track, and there’s a short clip at the end of the movie showing all the work that Japanese game designer Kazunori Yamauchi puts into making the virtual cars sound real, that’s the extent of the connection to the product.

As for the performances in the film, thank goodness for David Harbour otherwise GRAN TURISMO would get completely stuck in the pit. His tough-love characterisation of Salter, whom I believe is a fictional character, is brilliant and provides the story with its only humorous moments. Madekwe, for his part, is as interesting to watch as a spark plug but his bland performance is eclipsed by Geri Halliwell Horner, whose husband, Christian Horner, is the Team Principal and CEO of the Red Bull F1 Team. The former Spice Girl plays Jann’s mother, Lesley Mardenborough, a woman who must surely have more emotional range than simply looking and sounding worried for her son.

GRAN TURISMO is playing now in Hong Kong. If you’re a fan of the racing simulator, you might find this film interesting. If not, you can safely give it the black flag.

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