Gran Turismo Movie’s Early Rotten Tomatoes Score Revealed

Gran Turismo: The Movie has an official Rotten Tomatoes score of 58%, which qualifies it as “rotten” according to the aggregate site’s ranking system. Gran Turismo has had 36 reviews submitted (at the time of writing this), and most of the reviews seem mixed, at best.

“Gran Turismo is a film of contradictions. On the one hand, it’s a video game movie while on the other it’s a true story about how a video game turned one of its players into a legitimate racecar driver. It’s a film aimed at fans of said video game, but not quite a feature built for the whole family,” The Wrap critic Kristen Lopez writes, later adding that, “Gran Turismo works best because it eschews its video game origins quickly before settling into a standard race car film. It’s unknown how fans of the game will respond to the movie… but on the whole fans of racecar films should be in for a good time.”

AP critic Lindsey Bahr echoes the theme of a Gran Turismo being a mixed bag of a movie, writing that it’s less a celebration of racing sports, and more a sponsored ad for both gaming and racing: “The movie on the page wants to romanticize the simple pleasures of race car driving outside of the glitz and glamour of the high-rolling industry, and has been directed by someone who doesn’t actually believe that the driving is enough and that it does need all the trimmings of a Fast and Furious spinoff to make it exciting to an audience… And I think therein lies the essential incongruity of what amounts to a moderately entertaining, very long Super Bowl spot-quality commercial for PlayStation and Nissan.”

Gran Turismo has been something of an interesting hodgepodge of factors coming together. It is indeed a movie based on a video game – a video game which indeed inspired a real-life competitor to become a racecar driver. That multi-layered story is difficult enough to crack – few would’ve expected the visual effects visionary behind District 9 (Neill Blomkamp) to be the director to take it on. From the sound of the reviews, the finished product is as strange as it sounded on paper.

SYNOPSIS: Gran Turismo is based on the unbelievable true story of a team of unlikely underdogs – a struggling working-class gamer (Archie Madekwe), a failed former racecar driver (David Harbour), and an idealistic motorsport executive (Orlando Bloom). Together, they risk it all to take on the most elite sport in the world. Gran Turismo is an inspiring, thrilling, and action-packed story that proves that nothing is impossible when you’re fueled from within.

Gran Turismo has a new release date of August 25th. Early screenings will be held selectively starting on August 11th.