Rush

Hollywood has a real hard time making car-racing movies even remotely compelling. The latest genre misfire comes from director Ron Howard, who brings the true story of James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) to the big screen in surprisingly ho-hum fashion. The surprise comes in that the story itself is so amazing, it wouldn’t seem possible to render it dull, yet Howard manages just that. For a racing movie, surprisingly little of the film actually takes place on the racetrack. Instead, too much of the film is devoted to routine love stories that seem to be a means of saving budget. Bruhl is decent as Lauda, a determined man who returned to racing mere weeks after being severely burned in a near fatal crash. Hemsworth is charming as Hunt, but little more. Their rivalry was one of the greatest in sports history, yet this movie turns it into a soap opera.