REVIEW / BIOGRAPHY DRAMA
FORD V. FERRARI (PG13)
152 minutes /Opens today/2 stars
The biopic Ford V. Ferrari could have been many things - a tale of masculinity as written in engine oil, blood and speed or a tragedy about obsessions, men looking for trophies at the expense of everything else.
Instead, director James Mangold attempts to hammer the messy facts of the story into a feel-good movie template about following one's dreams, the way a Sunday mechanic might try to stick rear spoilers on a 2003 Hyundai Sonata.
The result is sporadically entertaining - the racing sequences are top-notch, as real and non-computer-generated as any red-blooded petrolhead might want - but there is a jerkiness to the storytelling that stops this from being what it could be.
It starts in the boardrooms of American car giant Ford, which in the 1960s was known for making cars that only an accountant could love.
When the company's purchase of the Italian sports carmaker Ferrari is foiled, the Ford executives, led by Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal), decided to go after the top prize at the Le Mans 24-hour race, to humiliate Ferrari and win honour for American car manufacturers.
The Le Mans race is viewed as one of the ultimate tests of endurance, of both car and driver.
The Ford team ropes in an American maker, the legendary Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), as a designer and a steely-nerved but volatile driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale), to anchor their Le Mans team.
The events leading up to the 1966 race unfold in a manner as to show that Shelby and especially Miles are eccentric geniuses, but at the same time perfectly normal, decent people, so that audiences can excuse their chaotic rages and, let's call it what it is, cheating.
Interestingly, the best scenes happen not at the Miles home or the Shelby garage.
The standout bits happen at the Ford executive suite in Detroit.
There, vice-presidents jostle for influence over the chief executive, Henry Ford II, grandson of founder Henry Ford, in the manner of sycophantic courtiers surrounding a king.
These scenes are skilfully handled as comic setpieces - complete with a crew that includes a villainous backstabber, Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), and the truth-teller Iacocca. Henry Ford II is played by the wonderful Tracy Letts as a man on the verge of letting his icy fury become much hotter.
Mangold is a brilliant teller of tales about men of action risking everything for a shot at redemption. His work includes the Wolverine story Logan (2017) and the under-rated western 3:10 To Yuma (2007, also starring Bale).
He seems to have slipped here.
In this slick but hollow story about how scruffy, scrappy Americans came, saw and conquered a race that had up till then belonged to snooty, treacherous Europeans, moviegoers could have done with less lazy stereotyping and more honesty.
