August 27th, 2023
Common Sense Media Age: 11+ Violence 3/5 Language 3/5
My Age Recommendation: 11+ (Due to some intense sequences of car crashes and some strong language throughout).
When I first saw an ad for this movie, I thought this was going to be a terrible movie. I've never played Gran Turismo games before, however I have heard of people who play them and frequently say how the game is supposed to simulate actual racing, which builds on the plot of this film. I'm not going to lie, if this movie was not 4 dollars on National Cinema Day, I probably would have skipped it, but I am glad I didn't! The story follows Jann who has played countless hours of Gran Turismo and has gotten really good at the game. However, he is a college dropout who left college to try and pursue a racing career which he hasn't even started yet. When his parents force him to go do something with his life, the creators of Gran Turismo create a racing academy for the top GT players around the world, and he was chosen to be one of them! Now he must train to be the best of the group in order to live his racing dreams. With the steep learning curve from a 'realistic video game' to real life racing, Jann learns that his talent will come at a cost, and it could be fatal! Let me say, this movie was a whole lot better than I thought it would be. The entire movie was intense and incredibly entertaining, with the CGI in the racing scenes (when integrating gameplay with actual racing) was really cool visually and the racing scenes themselves were done incredibly well. The pacing of the movie was a little bit fast, which did hurt the main story line a little bit, but the incredible racing scenes made up for most of it. The main problem here however is the lack of character development and a rushed story. I had a feeling before watching this movie that it would be entertaining and less story focused, and I seemed to be correct. The story was weak and unexplained, and the characters were also not developed well throughout the movie. For the first time ever, I won't give a movie with these flaws a 2 star rating and give it 3 stars because of the extreme entertainment factor that I was not expecting and how well all the racing scenes were done. Since racing is the main point of the movie, I feel like putting a little more importance on the racing scenes themselves towards the overall star factor is valid. Overall, this was an extremely entertaining and exhilarating movie with some dismissible flaws.
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