Carroll Shelby is an American car designer and his driver of choice is Ken Miles. They battle corporate interference and the laws of physics to build a revolutionary race car for Ford. Their goal is to defeat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. Enzo Ferrari’s fast Rosso-Corsa racing cars have continually dominating the mid-1960’s motorsport world. Shelby is a race car driver but he is forced to retire after winning the 1959 ’24 Hours of Le Mans’ endurance race. Lee Iacocca and Henry Ford II offer Shelby an opportunity to beat the Italians at their own game. British sports car driver and racing engineer Ken Miles agrees to lend a hand and improve the image of the Ford company. The race team has a limited amount of time to rewrite history. They develop the Ford GT40 Mk I high-performance racing car. Now, this Ford car needs to prove itself against Farrari.
This is a fact based racing drama. It’s briskly paced and entertaining enough to appeal to non racing fans. It includes car crashes, explosions, drivers on fire and people dying in car wrecks. Characters also fight, punch, wrestle and they have some violent temper tantrums. Language is fairly strong. Era-appropriate brands are featured in ads around the racetrack. Some of the brands are Coppertone, Good Year, Budweiser. One character takes prescription medication for a heart condition and there is some background smoking. Ford was the winner not because Miles outraced Ferrari but the Italian cars all broke down and the Ford cars excelled. The engineering is the true drama of the race and that is not given enough credit in the film. It’s not as easy to get viewers excited by the details of fixing leaks and running engines until they blow and finding a fix over and over!! I don’t know why I was surprised that the suits at Ford were always trying to interfere with Shelby and the driver Miles?? Ken is the best driver but they don’t like his image?? Carroll must have chewed a lot of gum very rapidly because he is doing that in this film? 5* (I really liked this movie)
152 min, Action directed by James Mangold and written by Jax Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth with Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Jon Bernthal, Caitriona Balfe, Josh Lucas, Noah Jupe, Tracy Letts, Remo Girone, Ray McKinnon, J J Feild, Jack McMullen, Corrado Invernizzi.
Note: Imdb 8.1 out of 10 with 237,832 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 92% with 329 critics 98% with 98 ratings, Roger Ebert 3* Glenn Kenny, Common Sense Media Jeffrey M. Anderson, age 13+, positive messages 2*, role models 2*, violence 3*, sex 1*, language 3*, consumerism 2*, drinking drugs & smoking 0, The Washington Post 3* out of 5* Kristen Page-Kirby, RollingStone 4* out of 5* Peter Travers, Metacritic 81out of 100 with 47 critic reviews (positive 42, mixed 5, negative 0), 8.3 out of 10 with 551 user scores (496 positive, 37 mixed , 18 negative), Letterboxd 3.8* out of 5* with 395 fans, Amazon 4.7* out of 5* with 15,058 reviews.
Special Note: This film is also known as Le Mans ’66. Christian Bale took race driving lessons at the Bondurant High Performance Driving School. The founder of the school had been a friend of Ken Miles. Bale also got to hear plenty of stories about the 1960’s racing scene. Stunt coordinator Rober Nagel later said that Bale was “hands down the best actor I’ve ever trained.” Bale had seven months to lose seventy pounds before filming. He gained a lot of weight for his role in Vice 2018. Ford distanced themselves from the film before it was released over its portrayal of Leo Beebe as bossy and a manipulator?
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