[snakeeyes]

The Ferrari replicas in the film were remarkably well done, but clearly replicas. I wonder who built them and what chassis they were built on. I don’t know when the last time a Ferrari P car changed hands was, but with a GTO going for something like $30 million a year or so back I can only imagine how valuable the rarer prototype Ferraris are.

The thing that stood out to me—and I confess I’m one of the guys who notices things like wrong-sized wheels on the Daytonas—was not those things but how many things the filmmakers got right. They clearly went through great pains to duplicate the very, very early Ford GT that Shelby started with, and it was nice to see things like how they used the right color schemes for the “dead heat” 1966 cars.

Curious that Cobras feature prominently, and we see period-correct Cobra jackets and Shelby American signs on buildings, but the word “Cobra” as far as I recall is never spoken once in the 2 1/2 hours.

I wish they would have portrayed more of Remington as the mechanical engineering wizard he was. They allude to it with the quick-change brakes but beyond that he’s kind of portrayed as a salesman type. I also thought his actor (Ray McKinnon) sounded more like Shelby than Damon did, LOL.

Setting all that aside, I genuinely enjoyed it and thought it did about the best job of avoiding being “another racing movie” as you could ever hope a racing movie would be. The portrayal of Miles as a committed husband and father, and not “just” a driver, was great.

About the best compliment I can pay the film is that, after I sat down, a group of about a dozen teens came in and sat down three seats away. Before it started they were unsurprisingly being noisy and messing around on their phones, and I wondered if I was going to end up having to find another seat. About 30 minutes in, however, I realized they were dead silent and looked over to see all of them watching intently. In the last scene with Miles several were literally on the edge of their seats. And, when the credits rolled and I got up to leave, I was really pleased to hear them clapping loudly. That tells me that the film is a winner with a pretty broad audience and gives me some hope that another generation of young people will be interested enough to learn more about the story.

One more thing—am I the only one who wanted to reach into the screen and turn Damon’s cowboy hat around? LOL