Ferrari

Directed by Michael Mann, Ferrari details the personal and professional struggles over Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) during the summer of 1957. It’s a thin premise that’s employed to mostly (and infuriatingly) tiresome and interminable effect by Mann, as the filmmaker, armed with Troy Kennedy Martin’s screenplay, delivers an arms-length misfire that contains few elements designed to capture and sustain the viewer’s interest – with Mann’s oddly avant-garde sensibilities established right from a formless, context-free opening stretch devoid of compelling attributes. (It doesn’t help, certainly, that Mann has suffused the proceedings with a host of underdeveloped, unsympathetic characters, including Driver’s one-note protagonist.) And while the picture admittedly does boast a very small handful of captivating sequences, including an impressively shocking car crash, Ferrari, which goes so far out of its way to avoid biopic-centric cliches that it becomes incoherent, builds towards a third-act race that’s hardly as exciting or satisfying as Mann has surely intended (ie the viewer has nothing invested in any of this) – with the end result a deeply disappointing trainwreck from a frustratingly hit-and-miss filmmaker.

* out of ****