How many RPMs was it again?

Rating: 9/10 (1 December 2019)

Okay, get this out of the way first: 7000 revolutions per minute - the limit of the Ford 427 engine... or better, the limit of the valvetrain. A stock(ish) 427 will start to float its valves above 7k and lose power. This was it... it's not a hard limit, a few years later these FE motors were turning 8-8500rpms, but the screenwriter for some odd reason focused on this minutiae. Everything else is perfect; although we know what happened in '66, everyone in the theater was sitting on the edge of their seats. The sounds were great, the straight-cut gears in the gearbox whining louder and higher as the car accelerates, with the staccato of an almost-no-exhaust V8, all piped through THX speakers is close to a religious experience, especially as very few of us got to hear this monster live.
Acting is on point, finally a movie where Christian Bale doesn't have to fake an American accent, Matt Damon pulls off a seemingly effortless Carrol Shelby - no doubt weeks and weeks of acting work and watching Shelby interviews went into it, but the whole movie just feels like one of those special ones, where the actors just enjoyed themselves.