3 stars out of 5
I dig fast cars and Matt Damon. I do not dig rooting for big stupid companies. Eh, I gave the movie a chance. Meh, I reacted.
Starts out pretty promising. Driver’s point-of-view, speeding through a race course at night. Cool. And if there has been a previous movie about the 24-hour Le Mans race, I haven’t seen it, so that’s pretty compelling. And at the very least, I finally learned to pronounce it le MON instead of le MONZ.
Damon, as real-life former driver/racecar builder Carroll Shelby, is reliably solid and likable. Christian Bale, as real-life bad-boy mechanic/driver Ken Miles, is reliably unlikable. Tracy Letts is quite believable as thick-bodied corporate blowhard Henry Ford II. And Jon Bernthal is a poor man’s Chris Messina (himself a poor man’s Dermot Mulroney) as young Lee Iacocca, Ford marketing upstart.
From what I’ve read, the story sticks pretty closely to the facts: To appeal to younger consumers, Ford wants to build a racecar. They tried and failed to purchase Ferrari, so decided to challenge the Italian auto greats at the legendary Le Mans. Iacocca recruits Shelby, who brings Miles aboard. The only real exaggeration seems to be making Ford’s Leo Beebe into a cartoonish corporate-stooge bad guy, thwarting Shelby and Miles at every… uh… turn. That caricature is unfortunate, as it hurts the movie’s overall realism.
Other problems: It’s 1957 and I blinked and it was 1965. Huh? Also, I know we’re rooting for Shelby and Miles, but Shelby often comes across as a sellout to Ford Motors, and that didn’t make me feel great. (Plus he cheats a little.) Also, too much gearhead lingo. And most damning, where there should be great drama — which we’ve seen in racing movies time and again, so it’s quite possible — there is not great drama. This is likely a failure of sticking too closely to reality. Interesting subject but not interesting enough for a 2.5-hour movie. Le Yawn.
Jack Silbert, curator