Ford vs Ferrari (Film Review)

Ford vs Ferrari is a good film that's structure has been seen many times before.  It adheres closely to the Hollywood biographical drama formula just with a new setting of the titled auto manufacturing companies competing to win a car race.

The true story of how Ford Motors challenged the perennially dominant Ferrari racing team using automotive designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and gifted British driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) is intriguing from the basis alone.  The film adaptation does many things right: it establishes the rivaling feud between Ford and Ferrari, sets up the key characters and their motives, displays the engineering process and business working in an engaging fashion, and effectively sets up the intensity, dangers, and skill required for the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race.  The latter two aspects are impressive feats for capturing my attention given I know very little, nor care much about cars and racing.  My friend who saw the film with me, however, is a car fanatic and loved the film’s approach towards the subject matter.  The film also boasts a respectable cast of solid actors, an almost necessity for such a by-the-books story.

Unfortunately, Ford vs Ferrari contains the typical, fictional roadblocks and snags found in nearly every Hollywood biographical drama.  All the historical inaccuracies added for unnecessary dramatic tension when the true-to-life drama is already crazy potent enough.  I’ve grown tired of seeing the same-structured, cliche arguments where the antagonistic character says something snobby and/or dickish and the good guy replies with some snarky comeback.  I crave for sharper dialogue where the antagonists aren't just complete assholes and can actually speak to their opponents without coming across as major jerks.  Ken Miles’ wife Mollie (Caitriona Balfe) ends up being a prime source of unnecessary padding all for the clear sake of hitting those diversity quotas.  Nothing is inherently sexist with having an all-male/primarily-male cast, nothing is inherently sexist with having an all-female/primarily-female cast, nothing is sexist with having any kind of balance between the two genders.  Yet when writers and/or directors shoehorn in characters specifically to appease the masses and not because they wanted to, then it only serves to blotch the film’s quality—and Mollie is quite evidently being shoehorned in for such reason.

There’s very little attempt to hide that Mollie is only there to give Ford vs Ferrari its token strong woman archetype.  There's an entire section dedicated to her that clearly did not happen in real life, bogs up the film's pacing, messes up her characterization with a contradictory argument, and gives information that could have been omitted entirely or explained elsewhere in a fraction of the scene's time.  Ken’s son Peter (Noah Jupe), at least serves a storytelling purpose as a greenhorn to the car racing world—being explained multiple mechanics and/or activities for the novice viewers’s consideration (such as myself).  The finale makes it painfully apparent how irrelevant Mollie is beyond gender when it’s Peter who plays a prominent role in the emotional final scene while she only makes a voiceless background appearance.  Ford vs Ferrari is an overall good film with some very engaging sequences, yet suffers from an array of clichés and unwanted padding that drives the film into some less-than-stellar territory.