"Darling, men love women, there's no doubt about that. But, if there's one thing we love even more than women, it's cars!"
Wroooum. Wruuum, wrum wrum wrooooum wrummm. Oh, what a lovely sound. When I first found out that Ron Howard (Frost/Nixon, A Beautiful Mind) had stated turning these fiery mechanical roars into a movie, I instantly felt a deeply manifested need to watch it. I have a lot of fond childhood memories of me and my dad watching Formula 1 racing on Sunday mornings in our old living room; a fact that pretty much makes me the target audience for a film like this, which mean that I have to apologize in advance if this review turns out biased or one-sided because of it. However, I'm of the stern belief that Rush is more than just a simple action movie about cars that go really freaking fast, and I'm gonna try to explain why in this this review.
Rush is based on real events that took place during the 1976 Formula 1 season, which was a time in which about 10 % of the 25 men who entered the tournaments ended up suffering horrific deaths sometime during the season, as a direct result of the abysmal security requirements they had back then. In this particular point in time, James Hunt from England and Niki Lauda from Austria were the titans of the racing track, and their legendary personal rivalry during the 1976 season is the frame of this entire movie.
For all intents and purposes, James Hunt and Niki Lauda were as different as two men can be. Hunt was a partying, smoking, womanizing and spontaneous playboy, and Lauda was a calculating, strict, sober, lonesome and emotionally cold professional. The only thing that kept them in the same boat was their neverending love of fast cars, and the rush they experienced from walking the thin line between life and death on a weekly basis. These wast differences and their famous dislike for each other had to be captured truthfully and effectively for this filmadaption to be a success, and Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland), the man who wrote the script, does exactly that. The back and forth dialogue between the two characters is extremely well written and on point, and I've heard rumours about a possible third oscar nomination for Morgan circulating around the internet.
Even though the personal rivalry is the main plot device of the movie, at its core, Rush is a bonafide action spectacle. This means that if you do decide to watch it after having read this review, you absolutely have to go see it in a real theater. The racing sequences arguable are the main selling point of this movie, and I have to admit that it's been a very long time since I've seen cinematography and sound design come together as successfully as they do in Rush. In these visceral, ferocious and relentless moments, roaring engines, fiery pistons, whipping rain, burning rubber, intense stares, gears knobs, helmets, electrified crowds and explosive exhaustion gasses turn into the purest form of testosteronious poetry a man could have ever wished for, and the raw awesomeness of these scenes is worth the ticket price alone in my opinion.
Enough of the sweat and the petroleum; let's get to the more meaty part of this review. In my opinion, the only thing that matters more than a tight script when you're making a historical biopic, is that the people who you're depicting are reenacted in a truthful and convincing manner. As it just so happens, this is where Rush shines the brightest, but also where it falls a bit on its tail. The part of James Hunt is played by Chris "Thor" Hemsworth, and even though his job description probably consisted of nothing but a long list of actresses and models whom he'd be making out with during principal photography, I got the impression that he really did his very best to do the real life James Hunt as much justice as he possibly could. It didn't take long before his character became a little too cartoonish and repetitive though, which isn't so much Hemsworth's fault as it is James Morgan's.
I'm not necessarily gonna pin the entire blame on the writer though, because I have a theory that dimming down some of the characters and making them appear as broad and somewhat superficial strokes of their real life counterparts, might have been a studio decision more than a personal one on Morgan's part. After all, Formula 1 is a somewhat unknown sport in America, which is where most the movie's sales are gonna come from. It's possible that the simplification of James Hunt's character was done to bring things down to a more understandable level for those audience members who didn't spend several hours watching Formula 1 every other Sunday during their childhood, and the same thing can be said about the over explanatory commentary that keeps blurring along in the background during the racing sequences. For 95 % people, these simplifications won't matter, but for me, they did.
Okay, so Chris Hemsworth's James Hunt might have fallen a bit flat. In case of this movie's second main character though; Daniel Brühls Niki Lauda, we're talking about something else entirely. Brühl, who's best known for his role as Fredrick Zoller in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, is sure to garner a huge amount of international praise for him efforts in Rush, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him among the best actor contenders come Oscar Season. The way in which he encapsulates the intense and dead set mind of Niki Lauda is eyebrow-raisingly impressive; everything from the way he walks, talks and looks is accurate to that of the real life Lauda (at least in comparison to what I've seen in interviews), and I honestly believe that Brühl reaches a level of De Niro or Day-Lewis worthy proportions in terms of poor method acting in this film. Bravo Brühl, bravo.
When it comes down to it, the title of this movie refers to the feeling that these two vastly different individuals got from doing what they did. Formula 1 racing was an extremely dangerous business back in the day, and the movie does a very good job of putting you in the shoes of these drivers who put everything on the line as often as they did. Contrary to popular belief, Rush doesn't leave you wanting to double the speed limit on your way home from the theater, but makes you scared of going more than 30 mp/h instead; that's how real the danger that Hunt and Lauda went through feels. Despite its somewhat superficial and generalized characters, Rush is intense, thrilling and above all hazeblazingly entertaining. A Coen Brothers or David Lynch film it definitely isn't, but its sense of drama and realism and its ability to make you feel as if you're there in the actual car with Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl, is just a few of the reasons why Rush is miles ahead of all the other action flicks that have come out this year.
Ron Howard's Formula 1 biopic is the best movie I've seen in 2013 in terms of pure entertainment value, but in the end, the few issues that I do have with some of the characters does drag it down a bit. On top of that comes the slight sense of banality that follows the story throughout, which ultimately leaves me torn about what rating to give the movie as a whole. With these things in mind, I've decided to start giving half star ratings from this point on, and Rush will be the first movie to receive such a rating in the history of Andrew Lawrence's movie blog. On one hand, Rush is everything I wanted it to be and even more, but on the other hand, it contains too many minor flaws for me to wanna pay full price to rewatch it on BluRay, and that's why it ends up being a hybrid of "worth buying on BluRay" and "worthy of my seal of approval". (4,5/6)
Rush IMDb page here
Rush trailer here
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