Did Ron Howard Direct This Movie?

Rating: 5/10 (21 January 2020)

Blech, did Ron Howard direct this thing, or is James Mangold just trying to trick us into thinking he did?
Look, I'm not at all into cars or car racing, so maybe I'm not the target audience for this. But I'm also not into diamonds or the diamond business, and I thought "Uncut Gems" was one of the best films of the year. I don't have to be "into" a subject in order to enjoy a movie about it, if the movie is done well.
"Ford v Ferrari" is the kind of dull, bland movie made to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, which....guess what?.....it was. The world is full of urgent problems, so what's the last thing we need? A bro movie about a car race from 50 years ago. But if you're going to make one, try to make one more memorable than this. This is the kind of movie that makes whenever it's set look like a glossy magazine version of that particular time period. It's the kind of movie that has one woman in it, in this case The Wife, who the screenplay assures us belongs in this world of boring white men because she knows a lot about cars and can be sexually suggestive when talking about them. It's the kind of movie that lets us know who the chief rival in the big final race is by cutting to shots of him glowering at the screen literally every 15 seconds. It's full of a certain American attitude I simply can't stand, exemplified by the fact that it has to make all of the Europeans in the movie look like bungling fools. I'm not sure what the movie's point is. I think it means to set up a conflict between those men who built and raced cars because of their passion for the art of it and those who just wanted to make a buck off of it. So of course this message is packaged in the safest, shiniest, most corporate Hollywood product imaginable.
Matt Damon's good ol' boy accent is unacceptable. Christian Bale is too good to be in this movie. Noah Jupe is a cute kid but he's used as a cheap narrative tactic to make us even more worried about the race scenes because we don't want to have to watch a little boy watch his dad go up in flames in real time. The best moment in the movie belongs to Tracey Letts.
Grade: C