The film’s two most vivid sequences involve gruesome crashes that are sure to have the audience gasping, so there’s no mistaking just how dangerous the sport can be. Ferrari’s new recruit, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), takes the job only after watching his predecessor struggle to his sad demise. But no one seems to mind. They remove the fatal – and the film also dismisses the deaths, which in a gruesome case feels cruelly disrespectful. Perhaps Mann is simply reflecting the tough motor racing mentality of the period, but Ferrari’s team members are a curiously sleepy, passionless bunch. Not everyone is so enthusiastic that you might feel entitled to ask why drivers risk life and limb, and why Enzo himself is so eager to win. Why, having lost a brother and a son to disease, is he so relaxed about sending young men (and sometimes unfortunate bystanders) to their deaths?
Who knows? For all his legendary achievements, he comes across as a grumpy provincial middle manager. Cruise struts around town shaking people down, but doesn’t convey Laura’s opinion of the company she helps run. And Jack O’Connell appears as the English driver, Peter Collins, but is given almost nothing to say except the immortal line, “Thanks, old bean.” To put it in more appropriate terms: it’s hard to see what drives any of this. The racing sequences have enough energy and danger to raise the pulse, but the rest of the Ferrari… well, surely a film about high-speed cars shouldn’t run as slowly as this one.
★★★☆☆
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