[6.8/10] *Ford v Ferrari* could be about anything, and it would be pretty much the same. It’s about car racing, but it could just as easily be about hockey, or architecture, or the world’s most noteworthy spaghetti-eating contest. Its off-the-shelf themes of corporate interference in the artists’ work and transcendent beauty when those masters play the game the ways it meant to be could, and have, apply to just about any movie using the same, well-worn mold.

Which is to say that this film doesn't have many, if any, new tricks to show its audience. If you’ve seen any of the plethora of Oscar movies that occupy the same space, or even enjoyable Disney flotsam like *D2: The Mighty Ducks*, you already know the basic beats of this movie. It is thoroughly fine -- well made, well performed, well built -- but lacking any spark to elevate it above a dutifully-constructed bit of awards-season adequacy.

*Ford v. Ferrari* is not, sadly, as its title suggests, a movie where futuristic cars do battle with one another in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. It is, instead, the story of car designer Carroll Shelby, race car driver Ken Miles, and their Ford-funded quest to beat the Ferrari team at the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans race, to cement their automotive supremacy. It is, in essence, a standard-issue sports movie, about overcoming the villainous, anti-American bad guys on and off the track, and rising above the, internal opposition to the purity of your mission.

But it can boast a better cast than most other movies in the same tradition. Matt Damon plays Shelby as a southern-stewed true believer, who gets to stand his ground and tear up in the various, prestige-honking moments when it’s all-but mandated. Christian Bale plays Miles as the eccentric, stubborn, “not a people person” driver who nonetheless possesses an all but metaphysical bond with the machines he controls. And it’s populated with performers who’ve stood out on prestige T.V. (and, sure, elsewhere too) like Tracy Letts (*Homeland*), Jon Bernthal (*The Walking Dead*), and Ray McKinnon (*Deadwood*).

Unfortunately, *Ford v. Ferrari* doesn't give them much to work with, or perhaps, gives them too much to work with. Nobody just talks in this movie. Every single stream of dialogue is some kind of Oscar-reel speech about the majesty of the road or what this means to each of them, or the unadulterated beauty of their art to the point of exhaustion. The sentiments expressed are pleasant, if familiar, but there’s no thought or idea that this movie can’t turn into some sort of grand speech or monologue for its characters.

The raft of capable actors in this movie keep that onslaught tolerable, but it keeps the film’s main personalities feeling more like sporadic speech-giving machines than real people. Bale’s take on Miles as the Dr. House of racecar drivers occasionally breaks through that muddle and finds the humanity in what is still a deliberately affected performance. By the same token, Tracy Letts nearly steals the show in a scene where Henry Ford’s grandson genuinely weeps at the transcendence of what his boys have created. But on the whole, you could half-pay attention to every predictable, writerly monologue and not miss much.

You would, however, miss the stellar racing scenes with that approach. Whatever *Ford v. Ferrari*’s other faults in a paint-by-numbers story or thudding dialogue, it sure is nice to look at it in stretches. Director James Mangold, cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, and editors Andrew Buckland, Michael McCuskerm, and Dirk Westervelt construct a host of stellar on-the-track sequences. They are the absolute highlight of this film.

Mangold and company capture the intensity, the virtuosity, and the beauty of these machines in motion. The few moments when *Ford v Ferrari* can really grab you take place with someone behind the wheel. The film’s visual team knows when to show these cars balletically bounding around some corner, when to cut to the faces inside of them to show focus or determination or joy, and when to hold the tension of two vehicles in dangerous proximity or even contact with one another. As a surfeit of well-crafted racing scenes stitched together by a perfunctory effort at storytelling, the film can more than succeed.

But that plot drags this one down considerably. There’s nothing wrong with the tale that *Ford v. Ferrari* wants to tell; its story beats are just shopworn to the point of tedium. Both Shelby and Miles have their legally-mandated “Nah, man, I’m out of the game” moments before jumping back into the thick of things. Both face the internal obstacles du jour before each proves themselves to their superiors. And there’s even a smirking, foreign bad guy driver to function as the avatar for all that’s wrong with the world.

That’s the funny thing about this movie. It roots its story in the perspective of Ford and its employees doing battle against the stuck-up Italian carmakers. But it’s easy to picture an equal and opposite film, where the devotees who care more about perfecting their cars than making money do battle against the hubris-ridden Americans who think they can buy a victory on the track and even bend the rules or outright cheat to cause trouble. As oddly apt as this movie is to draw a firm line between its heroes and its villains, it doesn't take much of a leap to imagine the roles reversed.

But the sneering dastards of Ferrari are only the external villains of the piece. The film also spends an inordinate amount of time, and arguably its overriding theme, on the trouble caused by corporate suits who don’t know cars but think they can tell artists what to do. Leo Beebe is Ford’s executive director of something or other, and plays the shallowest clueless corporate stooge this side of a music biopic. The film uses him to present the thinnest art vs. commerce notions imaginable, presenting Beebe as the latest, barely-sketched strawman antagonist, in an archetype that cuts across genres but which nobody can seem to find a new or interesting spin on.

The irony of this film is that it is nominally devoted to the merits of artistic purity. The broader arc of the film involves Ford’s transition from a company that only churns out undifferentiated cars in massive factories, to one that learns to trust its artists and achieve greatness by appreciating the individual beauty and soul of what it makes.

And yet, this movie feels like something that Ford might have produced before this grand awakening. It’s not a bad movie by any stretch. It’s a competent film that checks every necessary box for a replacement level, awards season release. But for a film so devoted to individual splendor and artistry, the movie itself feels oddly soulless. Despite its devotion to the merits of individual artistic purity, *Ford v Ferrari* plays like it just rolled off the assembly line.