Rush

The sto­ry of James Hunt and Niki Lau­da was always going to be a tempt­ing one for Hol­ly­wood types. The for­mer was a play­boy prince of the For­mu­la 1 world, preter­nat­u­ral­ly gift­ed but arguably more inter­est­ed in booze and girls. The lat­ter was a stern, ded­i­cat­ed soul who over­came a hor­ri­fy­ing crash to be back on the track with­in weeks. Their rival­ry elec­tri­fied the motor rac­ing world in the 1970s, and it only seemed a mat­ter of time until their sto­ry came to the big screen. It’s just a touch regret­table that it arrived under the bland stew­ard­ship of Ron Howard.

The erst­while Fonzie foil reunites with Frost/​Nixon writer Peter Mor­gan for Rush, which sees Thor star Chris Hemsworth play Hunt, with Ger­man char­ac­ter actor Daniel Brühl as Lau­da. For a while it feels like a missed oppor­tu­ni­ty: Morgan’s screen­play, com­plete with creaky dual nar­ra­tion from its heroes, is crude and broad-brushed in its ear­ly stages, spend­ing a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of time on Hunt’s short-lived mar­riage to a mod­el (Olivia Wilde), a sto­ry­line that ulti­mate­ly goes nowhere fast.

But the recre­ation of the ​’70s race world is lov­ing and impres­sive­ly realised, com­bin­ing archive footage and dig­i­tal wiz­ardry to great effect, and that’s just enough to car­ry you through the banal ear­ly stages. And once the film gets into the meat of the dra­ma — the 1976 sea­son where Hunt and Lau­da bat­tled for the cham­pi­onship — it becomes much more engag­ing. Dan­ny Boyle/​Lars von Tri­er reg­u­lar Antho­ny Dod Man­tle gives the race sequences a low-tech kineti­cism, and as the sea­son (and the film), nears its cli­max, you’re remind­ed that Howard was behind the gen­uine­ly nail-bit­ing Apol­lo 13, as he wrings every last drop of ten­sion out of the duel.

And his actors rise to the occa­sion too. While the pros­thet­ic teeth Brühl wears to cap­ture Lau­da are ini­tial­ly off-putting, he brings human­i­ty to a char­ac­ter who could be chilly at first glance. Hemsworth was a big­ger risk, giv­en that he’s pret­ty much only known at this point for play­ing a space Viking, but he makes a case for last­ing star­dom here; though the accent some­times sticks in the craw, there’s an easy charis­ma leav­ened with inner tur­moil that’s rem­i­nis­cent of Robert Red­ford in his prime. (Spe­cial men­tion should be made of Con­trol actress Alexan­dra Maria Lara, who pro­vides the film with much of its heart as Lauda’s wife).

The film, how­ev­er, is nev­er quite as inter­est­ing as its per­form­ers. Morgan’s script (which improves as it goes on) hints at gen­uine insight about the nature of com­pe­ti­tion, the ways that such rival­ries can both help and hin­der us. But for all of his Michael Mann-aping moves here, Howard can’t com­mit to the theme, and lets the end­ing floun­der under a kind of fist- pump­ing tri­umphal­ism that sits uneasi­ly with what came before. The direc­tor sides with Hunt and his heart-over-head approach to rac­ing, and look­ing at the fin­ished film, you can see how that happened.