Ferrari review – fast cars, slow storytelling from Michael Mann | Drama films

It’s a film full of seductively curvaceous, lipstick-red sports cars tearing through the Italian countryside, with a side helping of explosively passionate marital discord. And this undeniably handsome 1957-set biopic of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), former racing driver and now the owner of a car company on the brink of financial collapse, is directed by Michael Mann, a film-maker who, with pictures such as The Insider, Ali and Miami Vice, has a proven knack for propulsive, high stakes dramas. Which is why it’s surprising that so much of the storytelling here putters along like a two-stroke moped struggling up a hill. For all the teeth-rattling racing shots, the camera peering over the drivers’ shoulders as the road turns into a blur of asphalt, this is a film that seems rather bogged down in other, less exciting stuff, such as discussions of mergers, visits to the bank and the tantalising hint of accounting anomalies.

Part of the problem is that Driver, in his second performance as an Italian business patriarch after 2021’s House of Gucci, is a curiously muted and bloodless presence at the heart of the film. And the drivers – played by Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell and Patrick Dempsey, among others – are thumbnail sketches, making it hard to get invested in the question of who, if any, will wipe out. However, a terrific Penélope Cruz makes up for the lack of colour with her enjoyably strident turn as Ferrari’s permanently furious wife, Laura. She stomps through the film with a handbag stuffed full of cash and long-nurtured grudges, occasionally pausing to unload her revolver into the wall to emphasise a point.

It’s a film full of seductively curvaceous, lipstick-red sports cars tearing through the Italian countryside, with a side helping of explosively passionate marital discord. And this undeniably handsome 1957-set biopic of Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver), former racing driver and now the owner of a car company on the brink of financial collapse, is directed by Michael Mann, a film-maker who, with pictures such as The Insider, Ali and Miami Vice, has a proven knack for propulsive, high stakes dramas. Which is why it’s surprising that so much of the storytelling here putters along like a two-stroke moped struggling up a hill. For all the teeth-rattling racing shots, the camera peering over the drivers’ shoulders as the road turns into a blur of asphalt, this is a film that seems rather bogged down in other, less exciting stuff, such as discussions of mergers, visits to the bank and the tantalising hint of accounting anomalies.

Part of the problem is that Driver, in his second performance as an Italian business patriarch after 2021’s House of Gucci, is a curiously muted and bloodless presence at the heart of the film. And the drivers – played by Gabriel Leone, Jack O’Connell and Patrick Dempsey, among others – are thumbnail sketches, making it hard to get invested in the question of who, if any, will wipe out. However, a terrific Penélope Cruz makes up for the lack of colour with her enjoyably strident turn as Ferrari’s permanently furious wife, Laura. She stomps through the film with a handbag stuffed full of cash and long-nurtured grudges, occasionally pausing to unload her revolver into the wall to emphasise a point.