An interesting story wins out over average film-making

Rating: 6/10 (22 June 2015)

RUSH is a film which tells the true-life tale of the rivalry between F1 drivers Niki Lauda and James Hunt during the 1970s. It's a film which explores what makes the two men tick in terms of their personal lives, but it also looks at the world of racing back in the 1970s, which was definitely a more dangerous time to be a racing driver.
The film begins quite slowly, with lots of extraneous sex scenes that director Ron Howard seems to enjoy slipping in for no real reason other than to titillate the audience. I'm not really a big fan of Howard as director and he's quite lazy here, repetitively using songs on the soundtrack to evoke the emotion of his leading characters when better writing in the script would have helped.
Stick with it though, because after the first hour this starts to get much more interesting. A sense of suspense and impending doom hangs over the whole production and you begin to get invested in the leading characters. Both Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Bruhl are good as the leads, with the latter putting in a particularly effective performance as a man whose desire to win leads to some tragic circumstances. RUSH is rounded out by a solid supporting cast and some excellently staged racing scenes which lift it above its average beginnings.