Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Brühl, Olivia Wilde, Natalie Dormer, Alexandra Maria Lara, Pierfrancesco Favino, Christian McKay, Sean Edwards, Martin J. Smith, Rob Austin, Tom Wlaschiha, Alistair Petrie, Julian Rhind Tutt, Stephen Mangan.
One of the greatest sporting rivalries of all time certainly deserves the finest attention, the doting and sometimes critical eye of one of Hollywood’s premium directors and a script that captures the imagination and complexity of two of the motor-racing world’s most enduring figures. Ron Howard’s Rush delivers everything you could ever want in a film that looks at the relationship of man and machine…or in this case two men who dominated the sport in 1976, Britain’s James Hunt and Austria’s Niki Luada, the ultimate sporting playboy who revelled in the excess of life and the cool reserved detachment of a man born to be a winner.
Occasionally cinema delivers a film so immense, so captivating in what is shown upon the screen that the viewer finds themselves pulled in completely. The spectacle that unfolds is one that you want to watch again straight away, to feel saturated by the experience and Rush does that with some absolutely incredible racing scenes, two leading actors who sink themselves fully into the men they are portraying, for which both Daniel Brühl and Chris Hemsworth excel brilliantly at, and the knowledge that the film could not exist in a work of fiction, it is just too fantastic.
Chris Hemsworth especially captures the imagination as British racing driver James Hunt, the passion and lust for life that was always going explode before his time was framed in such a way that you could not help but feel admiration for the man’s ambition and grasp on reality, even if it did in the end take his life.
The high octane way in which the race scenes were filmed owes much to the way that Ron Howard operates as a maker of high quality films and it would come as no surprise to see him take home an Oscar or two in 2014.
Rush should be considered amongst the very best of films centred around the sporting world ever made. Ron Howard, Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl have pulled off the seemingly impossible, they have created a film that captures the intensity of sporting rivalry, the passion that drives two people to be in competition with each other and yet in the end still have the grace to admit they respected each other despite their very real and sometimes brutal differences.
If there is one film to make sure you don’t miss between now and 2014, Rush is that film, extraordinary!
Ian D. Hall