Gran Turismo: Why Neill Blomkamp is a bad director

Gran Turismo is a 2023 film based on the racing game series for Playstation, directed by Neill Blomkamp in an attempt to escape director jail after his latest film, Demonic, bombed badly in 2021 and it takes the Tetris route and makes it a full-on biopic as it tells the story of Jann Mardenborough, a British gamer who became a professional racing driver after winning a race that secured his position in GT Academy and led to him signing a contract with Nissan to race professionally. Unfortunately, for me, this is Blomkamp’s worst movie as a director.

Let me explain why.

The first order of business is a summary of how Blomkamp landed in the director’s jail. After the smashing success of District 9, his career took a downturn with Elysium and Chappie, with both getting mixed reviews and his proposed Alien film for 20th Century Fox getting cancelled after the failure of Alien Covenant. He has since created Oats Studios and gone back to his experimental short film roots by creating a bunch of them to be watched for free on YouTube to expand them into a feature film if investors gain interest.

Apart from that he hasn’t made anything since. And his latest movie, Demonic, which was shot during the pandemic and released in 2021, got his worst reviews to date as well as bombing at the box office, despite its measily $1.5 million budget. Which left his career hanging on a thread. It’s clear that after all that was mentioned above, he needed a comeback. Something positive to get back into the good graces of studios, critics and audiences.

Enter Gran Turismo.

Now, second order of business is Blomkamp’s wheelhouse. He’s mainly known for high concept, Sci-Fi movies and District 9 proved his knack for that genre as he implemented a realistic style to it as well as some of the best social commentary in a sci-fi movie. Even in his later films, which suffered from lacklustre writing (mainly by his hand), the concepts are still interesting and have a lot of potential, which aren’t fully explored. So far, this makes him look like a director who values style over substance.

With Gran Turismo, he doesn’t have a high concept, nor is he in the science fiction genre anymore. This time he’s showing the biographical journey of a gamer who becomes a racer through his love of video games and his determination. It’s a more character-driven storyline and he has no excuse for fumbling the storyline once again. He cannot rely on creating a unique concept or falling back on cool visuals (though the race sequences are well shot, I’ll give them that), he needs to be able to understand what’s important in the story, which are the characters.

And with this film, he’s taken the safe way out and used every cliche in every underdog sports movie. Even though Blomkamp isn’t the one writing the movie this time (that distinction goes to the overrated screenwriting duo of Jason Hall and Zach Baylin), it still shows that he doesn’t have a good eye for a script. Even his directing has taken a nosedive in this film as we get haphazard editing and cinematography that wouldn’t be out of place in a Michael Bay film (coincidentally enough, Jacques Jouffret, who is known for being the camera operator for both Michael Bay and Michael Bay-Copycat Peter Berg, was the director of photography on this movie), not to mention bland shots during normal sequences as well as some grey and incredibly bland colour grading that makes it look like they didn’t even bother with the visuals. The pacing is also incredibly off and slow at times and I got bored fast as the movie takes a while to get going and the boatload of cliches in the first act bog the movie down.

And then there’s the characters.

Apart from the trio of Jann, Danny and Jack, most of the characters are boilerplate and surface-level and get little to no development whatsoever. While this is a biopic, the big problem is that almost all of the characters are fictional and don’t exist in real life; this includes Danny (Orlando Bloom), Jack (David Harbour), Matty Davis (Darren Barnet), Nicolas Capa (Josha Stradowski), Leah Vega (Emelia Hartford), Antonio Cruz, etc. So even there, there was no excuse for this at all. Especially with the story concept of GT Academy, which existed from 2008 to 2016.

I’m gonna go on a little detour and perform a writing exercise; I’m going to give some backstory to some of the characters to see if they can be fleshed out a bit. Because the writers could have easily done a tiny amount of work to make the characters more interesting and not change the structure of the movie.

First off is Matty Davis, Jann’s initial rival at GT Academy.

From what we gathered in the movie, he’s presented as the usual cocky and arrogant rival archetype that is humbled by our protagonist and gives him his respect. That’s not a bad start but the movie doesn’t go further with this, despite the 2 hr runtime. Here’s my addition: he’s the golden boy from California who seemed to be born for this kind of life; despite having immense experience in GT, he was already an experienced driver, having driven on a track before and competed in autocross events ever since he was 18. He sees this as his big break and has an arrogant and reckless side to him due to being extremely driven but has a good head on his shoulders nevertheless.

There we go, more of an explanation and a more interesting character (and also inspired by the background of Mardenborough's fellow 2011 winner Bryan Heitkotter, which makes it slightly more accurate to real life).

Now let’s do a couple of more. Nicolas Capa, he should be a shadow archetype to Matty and what Matty would have been like without the good head on his shoulders and respect for authority.

Let’s do one more character to cement my point. Leah Vega, who’s played by race car builder and YouTuber Emelia Hartford in her first feature film. Here, I’m gonna incorporate some of Hartford’s background into my backstory for her: She is a massive gamer, like Jann and has logged many hours into GT. Knows her way around a car due to a part-time job in a garage. Laid back but determined to become better, and like Jann, is new to the racing scene as a whole. Is also an anime fan.

There. Simple. And that concludes my writing exercise. And it sadly shows that the writers did the bare minimum in creating these kinds of characters. I tried to think of more backstories to the other characters but I couldn’t because they’re all so boilerplate and bland that I couldn’t dredge up anything of interest.

It also speaks of weakness from Blomkamp himself, as he’s not using his characters to tell a story involving social commentary. Which is a shame. I liked him as a director when he did District 9 and I expected more from him here.