Everything It Should Be

Rating: 7/10 (1 October 2013)

After a short framing section, this starts off with a bloody-mouthed Chris Hemsworth in half-undone racing coveralls strutting into an emergency room on a wave of testosterone like a cock into a hen house. Every female head in the place turns, and a glaze of lust falls across nurse Natalie Dormer's face. Within a minute and 4 lines of dialogue, he and she are doing the horizontal mambo on the examining table and, through a series of quick cuts, plenty of other places. In short, it looks like we're going to get a 16 year old boy's dream of being a race car driver.
It turns out to be a great deal more. Director Howard and writer Morgan turn out to have a lot more empathy with the precise, earnest, űber-professional Austrian Niki Lauda (known as the Rat or the Sour Kraut) than they do with long haired, gorgeous English party animal James Hunt – there's a montage after Hunt wins the 1976 Formula 1 driving championship that subtly trivializes and belittles what he does with his victory, and a concluding tête á tête between Hunt and Lauda that makes it explicit. This isn't surprising considering the way the critics have treated Howard's body of work over the years.
But along the way we're treated to a struggle between Cavalier and Roundhead, JFK and Nixon, inspiration and perspiration that is never less than captivating. The personal distaste between the two men, the contrast of styles, and the way they get into each other's heads are too intense for the subject of their rivalry, which after all is only motor racing. You feel that they were born 30 years too late, and that they should have been up in the sky a generation earlier, trying to kill each other in Spitfires and Messerschmitts instead of zipping around in McLarens and Ferraris. The gorgeous women (Dormer, Olivia Wilde, Alexandra Maria Lara) are more or less along for the ride as arm candy, although Hunt gets to display some dry, malicious English wit after his supermodel wife (Wilde) dumps him for Richard Burton. The racing sequences pull you in, and the overwhelming sound design gives you a real feel for the power (and fascination) of the internal combustion engine. The climactic race is subtly different than you'd expect from a sports movie but absolutely true to the characters.
This is not great art, but it is thrilling popcorn entertainment the way it's supposed to be done, and it is to racing movies like Das Boot is to submarine movies. They'll never have to make another one.