Rush - movie review

"Rush" movie review.

Saw the new Ron Howard movie Rush the other day. As a long standing motor sports nerd I was interested to see what it was like. Here's a review:

Rush brings the world of mid-seventies Formula One to the big screen, focusing on the careers of Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth), and culminating in the drama filled 1976 championship season. The success of the documentary "Senna" (about F1 champ Ayrton Senna) showed movie bosses that there's a audience for F1 films, and unlike the dreadful 'Driven' - Sylvester Stallone's cheesy 2001 racing movie whose script was so bad that F1 bosses wouldn't let him near the rights to use their drivers and teams - Rush comes with real pedigree behind the camera - Ron Howard directing, and a story from regular scriptwriter Peter Morgan.

It is not Ron Howard's first fray into making a 1970s period piece - this is the same director behind Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon - this time around he is focusing on two of the decades great sporting rivals. To some extent the heated-ness of the rivalry is somewhat overplayed; Hunt vs. Lauda was more a rivalry of circumstance with the two drivers following similar career paths in junior racing series and ending up in fairly equally matched cars for one Formula One season in 1976. before and after that year the two rarely clashed and had an amicable relationship off the track - certainly not a rivalry to compare with the epic feud between Senna and Prost a decade later. still, the legend persists because of the hugely eventful 1976 year, a championship that had almost every twist and turn; near disaster, disqualifications, controversy, and close competition, set against a world where F1 was becoming increasingly prominent on television and the drivers becoming global media superstars to match footballers.

It must be said first that Rush is a very impressive technical achievement. to procure a grid full of 1970s formula one cars, create mock racing sequences, and dress modern racetracks with enough period detail to look convincingly like the original races is no small achievement. previous racing movies like Grand Prix (1966), Le Mans (1971), Days of Thunder (1990) have made do with the luxury of filming around contemporary racing. CGI is introduced in parts to create crashes, and is occasionally jarring, but the sequences are usually visually interesting enough that a bit of dodgy CGI is only a minor problem. Obviously trashing priceless original 1970s f1 cars would be out of the question but there are a couple of occasions where it seemed as though more convincing crashes might have been obtained with mock-ups - Steve McQueen managed a terrifying crash sequence in 'Le Mans' using a mock up car way back in 1970.
It helps that we certainly care about the occupants of the cars when they do crash. there are echoes of Howard's Frost/Nixon in the treatment of the characters in Rush - neither man is a particularly nice person but Howard brings enough of their insecurities to the surface to turn them into people we can identify with and eventually sympathize with and root for. It's certainly to the director's credit that he does not succumb to the pressure (and allegedly some pressure did come from the studio) to turn Hunt in the 'good guy' and Lauda the 'bad guy'. To begin with at least Hunt is presented as the the heroic one; a fun loving free spirited type who seduces the ladies and parties hard with his loyal band of mechanics, while Lauda is a hard nosed Austrian whose blunt approach manages only to antagonise people. Gradually however we can warm to Lauda; after his charmingly awkward marriage to his bride Marlene we see that Lauda's sense of responsibility and work-ethic make him seem more mature  compared to hunt, whose marriage to the glamourous society girl and model Suzy Miller is quickly stalled because a long-distance relationship is not something the hard-partying James can cope with.

While the two brides are played by two well-known faces (Alexandra Maria Lara and Olivia Wilde), they don't have a great deal to do apart from to look worried or to cheer their husbands on in the race. In fairness to the director this is not a million miles away from the real life role of wives in most sports. And rush is emphatically a movie about Hunt and Lauda, there are a few notable secondary roles such as Christian McKay as Hunt's aristocratic patron Lord Hesketh and Stephen Mangan on good sweary-form as Hunt's chief mechanic. Of the other drivers of the era only Lauda's Ferrari teammate Clay Regazzoni is featured in any great detail, and then only as a foil to demonstrate that Niki may be a straight-talking jerk but he's faster than the established driver (Regazzoni). Keeping the focus on the two leads is undoubtedly a sound decision by the director, just as in Apollo 13 Howard didn't feel the need to show the Apollo 11 landing and kept Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and the rest minor extras to the strength of the film, so Rush is strengthened by avoiding needless explanation of who exactly Mario Andretti or Carlos Reutemann or John Watson are.

Of the two main stars it's Bruhl who performance stands out; not only does he look uncannily like the original but he nails the clipped speech patterns, brusque delivery and impatient manner of the highly intelligent and highly ambitious Lauda. And when the time comes for mask of implacability to crack and for Lauda to display vulnerability, he gets Lauda's fidgety nervousness without any melodrama. Hemsworth is less memorable as Hunt - not only does his accent slip close to Australian from time to time, but he looks too beefy and chiseled, and his hair is all wrong; more 1990s surfer dude than 1970s playboy racing driver. The real Hunt was undoubtedly handsome and plummy voiced, but contemporary film shows his noticeable slouch when walking, and his appearance was frequently disheveled and unkempt - whereas the Hunt in the movie often looks like a clothing catalogue model. Not to criticise Hemsworth's performance, in general he does just fine, it's just that Bruhl gets all the juicy lines and Hemsworth gets fewer moments to shine. Anyone who remembers the real Hunt as a television commentator can remember many moments of dry wit and often withering put-downs on drivers he didn't rate highly. The character in the movie gets a few moments -"I shall be getting drunk" he declares when asked what he will be doing after a victory, but other moments of wit are disappointingly absent.

If Rush has a flaw it's that while it is consistently engaging and exciting it is lacking in stand out 'moments', be it set pieces or snippets of dialogue. Occasionally Lauda gets to say or do something interesting; for example on his first test for Ferrari he tells his new mechanic in no uncertain terms that his shiny new red prancing horse is a 'shitbox!' but the script is not a sparkling treasure trove of new quotes for racing fans to remember. Certainly there's nothing here to match Steve McQueen's two famous quotes from 'Le Mans' ("a lot of people go though life doing things badly, racing's important to men who do it well" and "racing is life. anything before or after is just... waiting"). As mentioned previously there's also no set-piece crash quite gut-poundingly scary enough, or image of racing action so distinctive as to sear into the memory. even THE famous moment of the 1976 season, one of the moments of all time in racing, is slightly cold and uninvolved, burnished with just a little too much with CGI dressing and a camerawork that is oh-so-slightly too energetic. It doesn't compare to the astonishing moments in 'Senna' - conjured solely from simple television images - of Ayrton Senna sat slumped lifeless in his car in the moments after his deadly crash. In addition practically every piece of on-track action is accompanied by expository commentary. As Rush is clearly being aimed at the mass market, and particularly being sold at the American market, it's understandable why it's there - to explain some of the subtleties of motor racing (why wet weather tyres are overheating as a track dries etc), but often the commentary is clunkingly obvious and ruins the moment; "and Hunt has crashed!", "That could really dent his his championship chances!"... Er, you think?!

Still, Rush is certainly not the 'Driven' like b-movie disaster it could of been in lesser hands. The movie as a whole is very clearly a labour of love for it's director - the level of attention to detail put into the project, when looked at closely is evidence of that. Only an enthusiast would remember to give Hunt's Mclaren it's correct early 1976 look for the first race of the year, would go to the remains of the Crystal Palace track in south London to film scenes of Formula Three races, would paint Lauda's Ferrari plain red for scenes in testing, would know just how excited two ordinary Italians would be to have a Ferrari F1 driver driving their humble Lancia, would give so much time to the saga of Hunt's beginnings at the Hesketh team. most strikingly only a true fan would get the sound of F1 so right - the crackling roar of an engine starting, followed by the thrumming bass sound of the idle revs and the rising crescendo of the engine under acceleration. No other racing movie before has captured that element of racing - the noise that makes everybody around take a step back and further increases their admiration and awe for the pilot strapped in the cockpit. And if Rush doesn't quite unequivocally win the title - 'Senna' must still surely hold that spot, it's still a very impressive bit of film making, with one particularly stand-out performance, and a consistently engaging story that never lets up the pace.