Orlando Bloom, Ginger Spice and the true story of a video gamer turned real life driver: BRIAN VINER discusses Gran Turismo

Gran Turismo (12A, 135 mins)

Judgement:

Haunted House (12A, 123 min)

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Meg 2: The Trench (12A, 116 mins)

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There’s something very 2023, and not in a good way, about this week’s two major releases.

One is inspired by a video game, the other by an amusement park ride.

Sometimes I wonder if popular culture will continue to stuff itself until there is nothing left. I see a Love Island star has now signed up for Strictly. Maybe we’ll get the crap we deserve.

Gran Turismo isn’t bullshit, but it might have been fairer to call it simply Product Placement. It tells the true story of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), who in 2011 was able to convert his expertise in the driving simulation game of the same name into a career as a real driver.

Orlando Bloom plays, or rather overplays, a hyperactive Nissan marketing executive named Danny Moore who comes up with the idea of ​​holding a competition for Gran Turismo gamers.

The best players in the world attend something called GT Academy, where they learn how to race in real life under the reluctant tutelage of cynical ex-racing driver Jack Salter (David Harbour). One of them then gets a place in the Nissan team and has a shot at the big time.

The GT Academy recruits are obligingly cinematic: male, female, multiracial, young, slim and attractive. None of these obsessive gamers have pebble-thick lenses and personal hygiene issues.

No, the only problem here is that Jann’s (Djimon Hounsou) father, a former pro football player, thinks he is wasting his life playing a “stupid” video game. That sets up Neill Blomkamp’s film for the inevitable moment when the old man realizes his boy was right all along to make a best friend of his Sony PlayStation, and the pair will touchingly fall into each other’s arms.

As for Jann’s impotent mother, who tries to defuse domestic tensions by praising the lentils for dinner and understandably tears up when she sees Jann crash live on television, she’s played by Geri Halliwell Horner.

This is ironic casting because, in stark contrast to the weeping Mrs Mardenborough, the former Ginger Spice, wife of Formula 1 kingpin Christian Horner, clearly already knows her airbox from the elbow. Fittingly, she ended up in a film based entirely on formulas.

In fairness, some of the action sequences are handled well as the story steers us inexorably toward Jann’s defining challenge at the Le Mans 24-hour race. And his story is worth telling, even if we wonder why, after all his triumphs against the odds, he never became a household name in real life.

But the repeated merging of video game imagery and live action footage, which felt much more imaginative and valid in the recent Tetris movie, here just filled me with the feeling that I had been fooled.

The Haunted Mansion attraction at Disney theme parks first inspired a movie in 2003, starring Eddie Murphy.

Featuring a heavyweight, largely African-American cast, this remake does a decent job of blending supernatural horror with comedy and is aimed primarily at kids. But as popcorn entertainment, the hit and miss stuff is… mostly wrong.

LaKeith Stanfield plays a former astrophysicist in deep mourning for his wife, who agrees to help a doctor (Rosario Dawson) and her young son (Chase W. Dillon) rid their haunted new home of the many unfortunate ghosts lurking there. lie.

Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, and Jamie Lee Curtis play characters who aid the project, with Jared Leto as the source of all evil, a murderous 19th-century socialite named Crump (who may have more than a few thinly veiled Trump jokes). makes).

There’s also a reason why Jason Statham’s character in Meg 2: The Trench is named Jonas, because it’s just one letter away from Jonah, which is the closest thing in the Bible to an underwater hero.

The film begins millions of years ago in the Cretaceous Period, which, contrary to perception, was before Statham started playing action heroes.

Having established the megalodon’s credentials as a dangerous piece of work, as one would expect from a tower block-sized shark, British director Ben Wheatley’s shot takes us to the present, where Jonas and his team number of unpleasantness to deal with. on the ocean floor, not all created by the megalodon community once considered extinct.

It’s a relief, after nearly two hours of this folly, to come up for air.

By the way, just like in the first movie in 2018, many of the supporting players in Meg 2 are Chinese. Strangely enough, that was also a large part of the co-production money.

Bad acting, questionable writing… yes, it’s a real royal mess

Uma Thurman plays the US president and Stephen Fry the British king Red, white and royal blue (no certainty, 118 min, ★), a downright royal mess of an adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s 2019 novel about a top-secret gay love affair.

The handsome protagonists are the president’s son, Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez), and the king’s grandson, Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), whose mutual dislike quickly grows into mutually anything but.

The writer-director, Matthew Lopez, is American, which may be why Prince Henry uses American colloquialisms but makes arduous efforts to teach Alex the difference between the two versions of English: “By the way, we call them trousers, no pants, honey.’

But the many problems go much deeper than that. They feature some really crappy acting to match the desperately questionable writing as the movie, which tries to be both a comedy and a proud LGBTQ statement, falls between two thrones.

Heart of stone (12A, 122 min, ★★) stars Gal Gadot as a crack super-agent named Rachel Stone, who works for a shadowy but noble organization called the Charter. So advanced that it can “access trillions of data points,” whatever that means, and send vital messages to your earpiece even as you descend a mountain to take out bad guys, the Charter was drafted to clean up the mess that governments left behind.

Tom Harper’s movie could only be more of a Mission Impossible rip-off if it were called Mission Unbelievable. It’s relentlessly silly, but there are some lively stunts (if not MI competition) and an impressive cast that also includes Jamie Dornan, Sophie Okonedo and, fleetingly, Glenn Close.

You hurt my feelings (15, 93 min, ★★★) is a compelling drama about the lies we tell our loved ones to avoid hurting them or boost their self-confidence.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays a happily married New York writer who overhears her psychotherapist husband (Tobias Menzies, Prince Philip in The Crown) critiquing her upcoming novel after repeatedly telling her how much he admires it.

Truly, it’s a comedy of modern manners, cleverly written and directed by Nicole Holofcener, whose impressive credits include 2013’s romcom Enough Said, starring Louis-Dreyfus and James Gandolfini.

Red, White & Royal Blue and You Hurt My Feelings are available on Amazon Prime Video. Heart Of Stone is on Netflix.