Rush - movies about sports count as sports

Just saw Rush starring young Austrian Niki Lauda and a young Brit, James Hunt both played by actors.

In one sentence if I told you in this movie you would see F1 cars (the car equivalent of a jet), boobs, and gruesome injuries, you would run faster to the theater than Forrest Gump running like the wind blows.

In reality this movie has all of those things, but struggles to use them in a way that makes you leave the theater thinking you just watched the greatest racing movie of all time. Walking out, I felt more like E seeing the first cut of Medellin.  You know there's a good movie in there if only they weren't jumping shot to shot every 5 seconds.

Ron Howard fails to create a real sense of rivalry between the two drivers and fails even more at visualizing how talented these two were at their craft. In what seems as an attempt to always find the most artistically beautiful shot, you don't get any high speed, high danger sensations from the driving scenes. No scene or sequence lasts long enough to build suspense, and they make passing look like the easiest thing to do in F1.

Best way to sum this up is pros vs. Cons.

Pros
- Imagery looks great
- Writing is good. They don't over burdened you with over the top lines you might expect from a racing movie
- Contrast in character's personality is well displayed
- There is at least one scene that makes you feel sick

Cons
- Poor editing
- Nikki Lauda is made out to be an ass hole when really he's a racing legend. And now there is a driver's meeting before every race where driver's can voice their opinion on safety concerns. He pretty much started that.
- By the way Mario Andretti was a world champ and a great driver way to only drop his name a few times in the movie.
- No sense of timing, how long is a race? How far back are drivers from one another.

To summarize, if you're a big F1 fan and want an F1 movie, don't expect it. If you want a fast paced movie with lots of beautiful images and clever writing, and intriguing characters (most people do) you will enjoy this thoroughly. I would have shot the racing scenes in a time frame that more realistically depicts how hard races are and how patient you have to be to gain and pass other drivers, this is what made Nikki Lauda so good. Ultimately it just failed to build suspense that not only a great racing movie deserves but also the one that the real life story deserves.

I give it 2.5 tires out of 4.