Ryan McNeil
I’ve often wondered what makes adrenaline junkies like racecar drivers tick. What is it that pushes them to face certain death day in and day out, and do with with seemingly so little fear. Perhaps they do it to fill a void, perhaps to get a certain thrill. Or perhaps, when they see someone else do something so dangerous so well, they are driven to do it even better.
RUSH is the story of an epic rivalry in the world of Formula One auto racing. In the late seventies, the two best drivers in the world were James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. This movie paints a portrait of these two drivers at the peak of their form.
We begin in 1970 by meeting a driver working the Formula Three circuit. His name is James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth), and while we aren’t immediately privy to his amount of talent, we can see that he has a great deal of charm. Moments after he comes on to a nurse who is treating him for an auto accident, we are taken to the formula three track to see him do what he does best: drive. The idea of formula three is for a driver to show enough skill on the track that a formula one racing team will recruit said driver to drive their formula one car. To this end, Hunt shows great promise.
Soon though, another driver arrives that shows an equal amount of promise. His name is Nikki Lauda (Daniel Brühl); an Austrian driver who relies on calculation almost as much as he relies on instinct. While Hunt can see how much talent Lauda has, he doesn’t care much for his stuck up ways. Lauda, doesn’t much care for Hunt’s partying pretty-boy lifestyle. Thus the rivalry is born.
Lauda throws down the gauntlet first by buying his way in to Formula One. He comes from money, so when he discovers that BRM’s team is in financial turmoil, he stakes them for a season in exchange for a chance to drive for them. When Hunt’s team finds out that Lauda has made the jump to F1, they decide (since they are also sitting pretty financially) to bankroll their own team and get Hunt into an F1 car for the upcoming season.
While they two continue to snipe at each other – both personally and professionally – the rivalry comes to a head in 1976. That season finds Lauda as the reigning F1 champion, having driven Ferrari to victory in 1975. By ’76 though, Hunt has been signed on with McLaren – whose Mercedes engine is likely the only true competition for Lauda’s Ferrari.
With the design of their cars once again equal, Hunt and Lauda’s rivalry finds a new gear…one that hinges on how much risk each man is willing to face to be number one.
RUSH is at its best when it’s on the racetrack. Ron Howard and his team recreate the intensity of Formula One racing so well, that you would swear you are watching actual race footage. The film pushes and pulls us all over the track – from the bleachers, to the cockpit, to pit row. Every place it sends us brings us that much deeper into the action, and gives us higher and higher levels of excitement. It allows us further into this world than any other auto racing film before it.
I think specifically of the final race we watch, the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix. This race is spectacularly sloppy and scary since the cars are driving through a torrential downpour. In this moment, we fully understand the fear, frustration, and confusion that can come form driving a circuit like this. Using all of those tools, Ron Howard is able to take us out of the cinema and sit us front-row-centre on a racetrack.
Unfortunately, much of RUSH doesn’t take place on the racetrack, and the film suffers because of it. We never get much insight into what makes either one of these two men tick, though Lauda is given just enough definition to detail him as the more secluded and calculating of the two. Both men get married within the span of the movie’s runtime, but their respective wives are both afterthoughts. There isn’t much interaction with these women, though again in the case of Lauda we are given just enough to understand his respect and commitment to Marlene.
Pity we aren’t given anything that helps us understand what Marlene thinks of his driving – nor his ultimate fate.
It might be possible to overlook the shortcomings in Hunt and Lauda’s relationship with their spouses if we were given any sort of insight into their relationship with one-another. Sadly, we aren’t. We know that each one is driven by the other’s talent, presumably because these two are in a class all their own as far as skills are concerned. However, the nature of a rivalry like this is that it’s a two-way street. We can see the affect that Lauda is having on Hunt, but there isn’t much definition about what’s happening the other way. How is Hunt’s attitude and driving altering Lauda’s approach? RUSH doesn’t feel like it needs to tell us.
The lack of characterization is RUSH is truly disappointing. With all of the effort and attention to detail that Ron Howard puts into recreating the race footage, you’d think that a little bit of time could have been spent honing the script it was all being hung on. Instead, what we have here is an amazing exhibition of race footage grafted on to a pedestrian situation. For both of these men, the die was cast at a very early age. They went through more in their first thirty years than most of us will go through in our entire lives.
Its truly a pity that RUSH doesn’t want to paint a picture about how those incredible events affected these two men.
i agree. while the action scenes were thrilling, lack of character development ruined this for me.
The funny thing is that if this was “The Nikki Lauda Story”, they’re actually not as far off the mark.
Yeah this movie flirts with pure boring throughout most of its run time. The dialogue is stilted and the Instagram look does nothing but piss me off at the laziness. I like Ron Howard for the most part but I mostly hated this movie.
Hang on though: The “instagramed look” is a set of filters that make images look they were caught in the 1970’s. If a film is actually *set* in the 70’s, isn’t that the moment those filters are actually apropos?