Why the fuck should you watch “Ford v Ferrari”?
• You like stories based on true events in history.
• You saw Ford v Ferrari in story in “Grand Tour” and thought “I wanna see that in cinemas”. Well you got exactly that!
• You miss the old times: the simpler times, but at the same time, the more dangerous times.
• You are the one, who goes driving in the curvy countryside roads and imagine that you are racing, and then go too fast, and then police comes and your car gets taken away because It was the third time this monts already.
“Ford v Ferrari” (or “Le Mans ’66” in some countries) is a biographical movie that takes place in the 1960’s and is about Ford trying to win a Le Mans race that Ferrari have been dominating for years. Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts) asks Caroll Shelby (Matt Damon), who is an car designer, race car builder, and an ex racing driver, to build a car, that could win at Le Mans. The task is complicated, if not impossible, but Shelby is up for it and he joins forces with his friend and a great racing driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) to do the impossible.
This movie sums up racing pretty well: impossible deadlines, doing marketing over doing the right things, ruthless competitors, unsung heroes, and the most important: anything can happen. “Ford v Ferrari” shows also the behind the curtains political stuff and make viewers realize that taking part in racing and competing is not as easy and straight forward as it sounds at first. I would say this is not a commercial for Ferrari nor Ford, but more like a praise to the doers. The guys who actually make things happen: who build the car, test it, develop it, go racing and if needed – put their own lives on the line.
Both Matt Damon and Cristian Bale do a great job with their characters and acting. The genre of this movie is drama, although it’s also marked as action, there’s not much of that, so don’t be waiting full out action sports movie. It does keep up the interest during the full 2 and a half hours but somebody should really work out how to make better racing scenes in movies - it felt a little bit “the same the same”, and that comes from the motorsport fan! So, next time, I need real cars and real stunts! Maybe if they had Tom Cruise in the movie, like the idea was in the beginning, it would have been all practically done by him.
Why the fuck you shouldn’t watch “Ford v Ferrari”?
• Absolutely nothing relation to racing interests you.
• You think: “Racing was a sport invented by cavemen who didn’t care about the climate changes.”
• You were the Porsche driver who was racing in Le Mans in 1966. Man, tough life.
• You don’t like to cry.