IN THE DARK REVIEWS

"Ferrari" is every inch a Michael Mann film, which means its acting, cinematography and production are all impeccable, but for once, I didn't find the result entirely compelling.

Mann has sought to make this movie since the turn of the millennium, which makes sense. Mann's obsession with propulsion likely inspired lesser directors such as Michael Bay.

Mann's narratives tend toward masculine protagonists, who pathologically need to pursue that which could lead to their own unraveling. Within the crime drama genre, such overriding, ruthless compulsion is easier to justify than it is within the lower stakes of sporting competitions.

Films such as "Any Given Sunday" have been more successful on such turf by expanding their focus to ensemble casts, as well as by turning a more jaundiced eye on their high-profile proceedings.

With "Ferrari," the focus remains on Ferrari S.p.A. founder Enzo Ferrari and his relationships, and while Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz deliver intense and authentic performances as the tempestuously wedded Enzo and Laura Ferrari, I soon felt like I'd seen this story before, especially after watching Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" earlier in 2023.

Look, I'm a guy in late middle age, so I get the appeal of a story starring a brilliant visionary and innovator whose women must suffer for his calling, because the only way he can be so good at what he does is if they agree to endure him carrying on multiple concurrent love affairs.

But while Nolan correctly relegated Oppenheimer's marital complications to a compelling parallax tangent of his central narrative, Mann devotes more attention to Enzo Ferrari juggling his wife and his mistress than to what inspired his legitimately paradigm-shifting engineering.

While this can make this film's personal scenes feel like the vegetables we have to clean off our plates, before we can be treated to the dessert of its back-loaded auto racing sequences, Mann deserves his due for simulating a social dynamic that, problematic accents aside, feels as convivially Italian as any dinner I shared with friends and rivals during my two years in Naples.

However underwritten the role of Ferrari might be, Driver puts the proper emphasis on subtle touches, such as Ferrari rolling his car down his mistress' driveway before starting its ignition, so as not to wake her, and laugh-out loud moments, such as Ferrari telling one of his race car drivers that his wife won't respect him if he doesn't emerge from the fray victorious.

And what a rich dessert this film's final racing scenes turn out to be, right down to their total lack of self-censorship in depicting the brutality of their consequences. Seemingly minor details interfere with the insanely high-speed motion of hundreds of pounds of uncompromising steel.

One specific camera pan is absolutely harrowing, but I'd defend it as justified and not gratuitous.

Tastes vary, and indeed, I'm already anticipating arguments from my fellow Mann fans, but I can safely predict that everyone will agree the final third of "Ferrari" earns its ticket price.

"What If ...?"

On smaller screens, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe's streaming series on Disney+ are starting to succumb to the slightly excessive serialization and multiversal connections that viewers seem to be tiring of in MCU movies, the second season of "What If ...?" is still a treat.

I will always love seeing Hayley Atwell play "Captain Carter," to the point that I wish she could do it more often in live-action, and just as this show's first season finally elevated Ultron into an existential threat worthy of his character, so too does its second season catch back up with players who retain the potential to fill far more screen time, offering genuinely unexpected twists on Karen Gillan's Nebula and Cate Blanchett's Hela, as each one strikes up unlikely alliances.

Perhaps the most significant concepts to be introduced to the MCU are the could-have-been Avengers lineups of the years 1988 and 1602, as well as the completely new character of Kahhori (voiced by Devery Jacobs of Hulu's "Reservation Dogs"), a young Mohawk woman in the late 15th century, who fights off Spanish conquistadors with the powers of the Tesseract (the Cosmic Cube, to us old-school comic book nerds), aka the Space Stone of the Infinity Stones.

As with Atwell, I adore Jacobs as an actress, so it was a double-dipped treat to see their characters team up against a suitably overpowered returning foe, but even this season's admittedly weaker episodes still gifted us with the madcap antics of an outer-space "Wacky Races" setup, after a seasonally appropriate "Die Hard" scenario in Avengers Tower (which also welcomed back Kat Dennings as the delightfully dissolute Darcy Lewis).

Just as "Batman: The Animated Series" introduced Harley Quinn to the DC Universe, across its media, I'd love to see Kahhori become an important player in both the MCU and Marvel Comics.

And check out the teaser for "What If ...?" Season 3, which promises to be a fun ride as well.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]