Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: Finally a movie about racing that is actually fun! Should be called Shelby v Ford, though.

“Ford v Ferrari” is only nominally about Ford versus Ferrari. While it is true that the whole reason for the movie is because one rich person, Enzo Ferrari (Remo Girone), pissed off another rich person, Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), and that rich person decided to stick it to the other rich person, the movie is more about how Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) fought with a bunch of corporate suits at Ford to actually allow him to build the car and get the driver he would need to actually beat Ferrari. In fact, when the Le Mans race actually occurs, there’s not really much tension between the two teams except for the director doing his damnedest to make the Ferrari driver look evil and the all too frequent use of the drivers staring each other down as they pass.

The good news is that the racing scenes are not at all boring, though they do occasionally go on for a bit too long with the aforementioned stare-downs and such. This opposite of boring racing is almost entirely because Ken Miles (Christian Bale) is a fantastic character. Without car crashes, racing is pretty darned snooze worthy, but intersperse it with Miles talking to himself and his car and his opponents even though they can’t hear and you have actual entertainment in racing.

The even more good news is that Bale and Damon make “Ford v Ferrari” fun even beyond the racing. I don’t know how true to character they play Miles and Shelby, but you can tell they are definitely having fun with it and it works well for this movie. Their characters are both hard headed and hot headed, but they also both want the same thing and they work together to produce something truly magnificent, if useless. Sorry car guys. Shelby has this great speech when he’s first kicking off building the car that will beat Ferrari. I don’t remember verbatim, but he talks about how lucky a person is when they find what they love early and can find a job doing it for they’ll never work a day in their life, but there’s another type of person who is driven to do something no matter what and they’re probably not so lucky because they will try to do that thing regardless of cost and that he is that type of person. So too is Miles.

Good racing movies are hard to come by and this is one of them. I had to actually look up other racing movies to see what I’ve liked and “Rush” from a few years ago was equally as good as this one. Prior to that? Not much. You have to go back to 1963 and “It’s a Mad Mad Mad World” to find a good one. I am only partly joking, but with a plethora of “Fast and Furious” movies to choose from, you can see my point. Now I want to see “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” again. And you should see it too. And “Ford v Ferrari”.