Rush Review: Cliched but Great
Rush follows the rivalry of F1 Racers Niki Lauda and James Hunt through a 6 year period from when they first met in Formula 3 to when they were neck and neck in the 1976 Grand Prix.
Directed by Ron Howard, Rush is very good at enticing fans of F1 as well as people like me who really couldn’t give a shit about it. I enjoyed this film because it had the human aspect to it. The film is narrated by both Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) and Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and they are both given equal screen time. We get a chunk of Hunt, then move onto Lauda, then back to Hunt and so on, but I never got tired of one of the stories and thought “man I want to see the other one now”. It’s pacing was good.
My main gripe with the film was that it was predominately a biopic, which if not done right, can fail miserably like Jobs and Diana (which has 3% on RT). The first 30 minutes are very textbook, introducing us to the characters and is very determined to move the story forward. The events early on are only on the screen briefly because they have to move fast to keep us interested, and I think it was a smart move to do that, but it felt a bit as if I was watching a film version of wikipedia at some times.
The film starts to get good in the second and third act, when we see Hunt’s partyboy obsession affecting his personal life, and when Lauda has his accident. Then we got to a couple more cliche moments towards the end, but as a whole, I don’t think the film could have told the story any better.
The racing sequences were very well done, with some great direction by Howard. The special effects for the cars weren’t that special, but the shots of the cars were often less than a second so it didn’t bother me too much. But you could tell that is was CGI which irritated me a bit.
The actors were great in this. Hemsworth was great as Thor Hunt and Bruhl as Lauda. Olivia Wilde played Hunt’s model wife, and she pulled out a decent British accent for that, but she had little screentime and was sort of integral to the story, but all the characters other than Hunt and Lauda were just there to support or challenge the two protagonists.
This is a film where both protagonists are the hero and the villain. I haven’t seen a film like this before, so I enjoyed it for that. For a film about a subject that I haven’t the slightest interest pulled me in and that deserves some credit. That being said, I don’t think I would rate it as highly as its RottenTomatoes score (88%).
7.5/10