When was the bar lowered?

Rating: 5/10 (11 February 2014)

Not bad but terribly overrated drama. Seems like these days every movie that is halfway good is over-hyped and hailed as a masterpiece. I don't know when it happened but at some point in the last decade or so the bar was lowered. Now every moderately good film is lumped in with the greatest of all time. I'm no racing fan but I have enjoyed racing films before. Rush is overlong and doesn't build to anything really. The ending, or more to the point the last half hour, felt like a story searching for a powerful finish that it never found. I know this is based on real people and events, but I fail to see how that matters in the context of judging how they told the story. A dramatic film is not a documentary and artistic license is acceptable and, in many cases, desperately needed. What it comes down to is that this is a middle-of-the-road drama. Nothing exceptional and certainly nothing new. The performances are adequate, but nothing to rave about. The story, real or not, is fractured and lacking in any sense of a point in the end. I felt like I learned nothing of significance about the two men that the film focuses on. This is particularly true for James Hunt, portrayed by Chris Hemsworth. Other than being a walking cliché, what else was there to the man? The film has no answers. It has few more for Daniel Bruhl's Niki Lauda. Perhaps if they had chosen to focus on just one of the men rather than both, they could have told a more interesting story. As it is, it's a superficial drama about two men with unimpressive racing footage sprinkled throughout.