[5]

Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl star as real-life race car drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, who became world-famous adversaries in the 1970s. Ron Howard (Apollo 13, Backdraft) directs from a script by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon), so I was expecting more of a character drama, but the characters and their interesting relationship are relegated to broad strokes. Most of the film flits by in a whizz-bang vignettes, a pastiche of various car races that are never all that exciting, with the briefest interconnecting scenes of the two men saying words to each other and finding love with co-stars like Olivia Wilde, Alexandra Maria Lara, and Game of Thrones‘ Natalie Dormer. The film begins to hit its stride at the mid-point, when lives are on the line and the two men begin to have more than an adversarial relationship. It begins turning into one of mutual respect. Hemsworth and Brühl both give solid performances, but the overall impact of this film is less like a Ron Howard story of triumph, and more like a show-off piece from Michael Bay or 1990s Simpson/Bruckheimer. And why in the hell is this whole entire film tinted green? Has color grading become such a lazy, sloppy endeavor that characters have to look like they’re on the verge of liver failure?