‘Gran Turismo’ Review: From Game Controller to Steering Wheel

The auto-racing drama “Gran Turismo,” based on the Sony PlayStation game and released by Sony’s Columbia Pictures, makes much of a concept I’d never heard before: “to podium.” It means to finish in the top three, and according to a crusty coach, only those “who podium” get to celebrate with champagne. Puzzling. Does the team that finishes second in the World Series dive into the Veuve Clicquot? Previous to this picture, finishing second or lower was commonly known as “losing,” but I suspect “Gran Turismo” is signaling modest ambitions both for its protagonist and itself: It would be content to be dubbed the third-best sports-underdog movie of the year.

A general sense that things aren’t heading anywhere too exciting pervades this cinematic chunk of corporate synergy (Nissan is also deeply involved, with its logos festooning the film). It’s based on the true story of a young video gamer from Wales, Jann Mardenborough ( Archie Madekwe ), who after becoming adept at “Gran Turismo” on the driving simulator in his home, won a contest dreamed up by a Nissan marketing exec (here called Danny Moore and played by Orlando Bloom) to goose vehicle sales. “GT Academy” was a reality-TV show in which gamers were put in real racing cars to see whether they could adapt their console skills to life-or-death reality.

Competently if unimaginatively directed by Neill Blomkamp (“District 9,” “Chappie”), “Gran Turismo” is a reasonably rousing tale of how a nobody from nowhere accepted coaching from a crotchety but loving adviser ( David Harbour ), powered through lots of training montages set to loud music (apparently it’s essential to drivers to do a lot of pushups and run up and down stairs), listened carefully to such wise advice as “Focus!” and “Commit!” and after many agonizing setbacks eventually triumphed as a professional race-car driver. Or, if not triumphed, at least podiumed.

Mr. Blomkamp fashions exciting race scenes out of swooping overhead shots and slick editing, but fleshing out the story and characters doesn’t seem to interest him or his screenwriters, Jason Hall and Zach Baylin. They don’t even attempt to add new elements to the “Rocky” formula, and as usual with these movies Sylvester Stallone deserves a royalty check. Considering how long the film runs (over two hours), it’s surprisingly thin on detail: Both the technical and tactical aspects of driving are pretty much ignored, and we come away from the movie having learned nothing about racing except (as we’re told twice, at length) that if there’s a car hugging the inside track ahead of you, you must swerve around it.

Mr. Madekwe is a likable presence, appealingly shy and awkward, but his Jann is also humorless, flat, unemotive. His most significant quirk is that he likes to listen to Kenny G songs before races. There’s a love interest ( Maeve Courtier-Lilley ), but the two barely know each other before he becomes a celebrity and invites her on what amounts to their first date, a grand tour of Tokyo. Slightly better realized is Jann’s disapproving dad ( Djimon Hounsou ), a former soccer player who now works in a rail yard and pushes Jann toward a more practical career than sports. Who can blame him? Outside of the movies, “Follow your dreams” is rarely the best advice. Within the movies, however, it’s merely a cliché, and “Gran Turismo” is unabashedly a film for people who like clichés, or who are too young to find them boring.

That it is also something of a corporate press release causes it to sidestep what ought to be powerful considerations. Mr. Bloom’s character spends barely a moment considering whether his marketing gimmick led to the 2015 death of a spectator at a race at the Nürburgring in Germany: As a novice driver, Mardenborough flipped his car over and it vaulted the track and fence. It was nothing but an unfortunate accident that could have happened to anyone, we’re told, but would an experienced driver have performed better? Mr. Harbour’s racing coach, the ostensibly tough but actually big-hearted Jack Salter, avers that Mardenborough must move on because “racing is dangerous.” It’s not supposed to be so for the fans, though. The question of moral responsibility—the kind of thing that makes for a critical element in movies that are more interesting, or less corporate-sanitized, than this one—is simply dismissed. Among car-racing films that don’t take the sport seriously, or explore it in any depth, I vastly prefer “Talladega Nights.”