The recently lauded winner of the Bayanbulak rally is drafted in by his friend (Sha Yi) to head up a new and well resourced team to try to put a Chinese team on the map amongst the international rallying community. “Zhang Chi” (Teng Chen) is told he can recruit the best he can; the tech is to be as good as it gets and so he confidently approaches the qualifying stages of the Muchen 100. Thing is, no sooner are they on the course than their turbos start to fail, none of his team make it to the finish line and in shame he has to resign. What we have known all along is that some serious mischief is afoot and when he discovers just what happened, and who was behind it, he, his co-driver (Yin Zheng) and their former team manager turned Uber-driver (Wei Xiang) set about freelancing their way into the race and proving that it really is the driver and the car who can make all the difference. In some ways this works quite effectively at casting aspersions on the automated nature of modern-day motorsport where just about everything is controlled remotely by the geeks with the computers back in a lab, but the rest of it has much more of the “Whacky Races” to it as what jeopardy there was gives way to some, admittedly quite entertaining at times, all-terrain driving that would probably have wrecked a Sherman tank let alone an high-performance Audi. Though it does ping at the sheer industrialisation of this sport, it doesn’t really go into characterisations so much and aside from Teng Chen’s we don’t really get to know anyone at all and his opposition are presented in an unremarkably sterile fashion that rather sums this whole film up. There does look like there is some real footage here, but it is difficult to distinguish that from the plentiful CGI and at times it reminded me of the pod racing scenes from the start of “The Phantom Menace” (1999). It’s watchable enough and there is some fun to be had, but I felt it struggled to sustain two hours of cinema.
