pacing on this is highly sloppy, and some of the penelope cruz character beats don’t quite work, but the central love triangle at the heart of the film elevates this quite a bit above the ridley scott-tier schlock that it’s competing with. it really needed more of michael mann’s signature experimentation with the medium. i think the reason the film comes across so weird and disjointed in places MUST have something to do with the ~40 producers listed in the credits. driving sequences are amazing, though: kinda like Top Gun: Maverick but for cars. and significantly less evil.
on the topic of comparing this to Top Gun: Maverick, there is something really interesting in the way american culture has just fully and shamelessly internalized inauthenticity. “italianicity,” as barthes called it, is the main formal element of this film. the titans of american storytelling, the manns and the scotts, have expanded their purview outside the strict canon of american stories and are now re-telling the biographies of Napoleon, Ferrari, the guys in The Last Duel, etc…and these mfers just straight up speak english with an italian accent. it’s so funny. it’s not normal.