Ford V Ferrari is directed by James Mangold and stars Matt Damon as Carroll Shelby (and performance is his business) and Christian Bale as Ken Miles and its 1966 and Henry Ford the second (Tracy Letts) wants to rejeuvenate his ailing family company so they decide to build a race car to win the 24 hour race of Le Mans but building such a car and then getting the right driver to race it will not be easy.
Ford V Ferrari was the one film I was looking forward to the most for the second half of this year as I love a good racing movie (2013’s Rush by Ron Howard is criminally underrated), the trailers were terrific and I love both Mr Damon and Mr Bale but could it race across the finish or would it burn out after the starting gun.
Happily very very happily this is the case of the former as I really loved this movie and genuinely think it is terrific for multiple reasons:
- Firstly Mr Magold’s direction is finely honed like a driver racing a car built for the fast lane, the way he paces both the quieter moments and the big racing moments is fabulous and the racing scenes in particular are fan-fucking-tastic from the low angles he shoots the cars from behind that reminded me a little of the Mad Max movies at their best and the way their edited gave me a sense of exhilaration as well as having me on the edge of my seat wondering how that final race would play out.
- Secondly the performances here across the board are great, both Mr Damon and Mr Bale anchor the film effortlessly, the former doing a great Tommy Lee Jones impression and the latter pretty much doing the whole performance in his natural British accent and one octive below his infamous Terminator set rant from 10 years ago (in fact during the film part of me was waiting for him to do a similar rant) while Mr Letts is really good as Henry Ford and has some of the films most memorable scenes.
- And lastly I have to give a special shout out to Mr Josh Lucas who plays one of the Ford executives but is so good you can just see Mr Mangold and his screenwriters seeing him as every slimy, I want full control studio executive they’ve had to deal with in their careers (and Mr Mangold had to deal with Miramax when making Cop Land) and that toothy grin, cynical smile and constant talk about being a brand man just works so well and I would love to see him get a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
Sadly I have to say however that this movie as much as I love it and I do very much it is a little long and there are times like a car doing a long race where you can feel the length a little bit and it could’ve lost 5 minutes or so without disrupting the film too much.
And so that was Ford V Ferrari and I loved this movie to death, direction/performances/sound/editing this is a finely crafted film and its one of my absolute favourites of 2019, 4 and a half out of 5.
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