Viewing entries tagged
Jon Bernthal
King Richard is a tidy movie. It hits every basic beat you expect an underdog sports movie to hit. There’s adversity and struggle followed by determination and the beginning signs of success before a climactic test of will and talent as the grand finale. Like another soaring sports movie with an unexpected ending – think of a sport that’s fallen out of favor in modern times – how the characters react when things don’t go as planned is what gives the picture its true strength and inspiration.
James Mangold’s very manly and patriotic sportscar racing movie Ford v Ferrari is about as slick as big Hollywood blockbusters come. The director with credits as varied as 2001’s Kate & Leopold, the 2007 remake of the classic western 3:10 to Yuma, and not one, but two comic book franchise films about the X-Men’s Wolverine character has turned his craftsperson’s talents to the sports biopic. Ford v Ferrari feels like a movie we might have gotten 20, maybe even 30 years ago. And I mean that in a good, throwback sort of way.
The script – originally penned by Jason Keller and rewritten by screenwriting brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth – features, if memory serves, exactly one female speaking part. At one point, that character is reduced to sitting in a lawn chair as she watches our two manly-men heroes resolve their differences with an old-fashioned American fist fight. The rah-rah patriotism of the picture – which only ever flirts with outright jingoism – brings to mind something like Top Gun, but with race cars instead of fighter jets.
All that aside, Ford v Ferrari is also a damn good time at the movies. It’s a crowd-pleaser that offers unadulterated movie spectacle.
To the people in charge: please, please, please let Edgar Wright direct the next installment of the Fast and Furious series. Let him write it, too. With Baby Driver, he’s proven he is up to the task. He might not have any interest, though. Wright thrives on challenging himself with a different genre for each new film he makes. He dismantles them, and rebuilds them in his own quirky, original image. He did it with horror in Shaun of the Dead, and the buddy-cop movie in Hot Fuzz. He did it with the romantic comedy in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and science fiction in The World’s End. Now he’s done it with the heist/car chase genre in Baby Driver. It’s exhilarating, funny, and a damn good time at the movies.
