Dumbed-down but fun

Rating: 6/10 (20 April 2020)

Le Mans '66 is a fun movie despite having an overly dramatized plot. In a way this is your usual Hollywood action/drama flick with little to no regard to respecting how events originally occurred. Lifting inspiration from incidents happening around its main people - Miles and Shelby - and integrating them into their story making it more thrilling but also less believable. Ken Miles' life had enough for a whole movie but they rather incorporated made-up drama than telling about his war experience or perhaps showing that the other drivers are not just there as simple antagonists. The handling of the 'Ferrari deal' is also laughable, distorting history for the sake of extra drama. I am the first to point out that Le Mans - the '71 movie - was a kind of special something, going to the extreme with its focus on motorsport while FvF went to the other extreme where human drama is the most important and the writers did not hesitate to alter facts and sacrifice character integrity in order to serve a thrilling story. In my book this is an inferior attempt at a historic biography/racing film.