Thor in a Car

Rush is built like a formula one racing car. There's no room for error and every nut and bolt is tweaked to optimize performance. I enjoyed it a lot but I'm not nearly as impressed with it as I feel I should be. I'm not a racing fan and I don't on the whole like sports movies but that's not the problem here. There's something missing. All of the well-crafted elements didn't quite cohere into a satisfying whole for me. I thought it was weighed down by biopic cliches, some clunky lines and there was too much exposition disguised as race commentary. Thinking in terms of the film's own metaphors it needs a little more of Hunt's roguish cavalier hedonism, a little less of Lauda's precision, calculation and risk management. It needs poetry between the pistons because ultimately it's nothing more than the story of two unlikeable men trying to better each other. The result is a solid film, but interesting rather than intense.  It becomes much more fascinating if you imagine it to be an alternative version of 'Thor,' in which the God with the big hammer is exiled to Britain in the 1970s and falls naturally into the role of a playboy racing driver.