But you don't need to be a motorhead to enjoy Matt Damon and Christian Bale as a pair of rebels risking it all for purity and glory. Yes, director James Mangold takes you down onto the raceway, with cameras low to the ground and care to show the crack of gear shifts and feet on pedals.
Yet he's not created a Fast and Furious film – this is more a drama about a pair of visionaries who fight against a smarmy bureaucracy. That vision happens to be on a track.
The first three-quarters of Ford V Ferrari sets the stage for the furious 40-minute restaging of the exhausting Le Mans race – an almost 5,000km, 24-hour slalom through country roads. So meticulous have the filmmakers been that they built an entire accurate Le Mans in Georgia because the original has been too altered in the intervening years. (There are not many cases when Georgia acts as a stand-in for La France.)
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Summary:
A well-oiled movie, running on engrossing drama and high-octane action.