Like The Killer before it, Michael Mann’s Ferrari has dropped its first trailer ahead of its debut at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The gap between Mann’s last films is even larger than David Fincher’s–Blackhat came out way back in 2015. But now, with the novel sequel of Heat 2 published and the world having forgotten how wrongly it did Blackhat, Mann is back with an Adam Driver-led racing biopic.
Much like House of Gucci, where Driver played another Italian on a mononymic basis with the rest of the world, Ferrari is both the story of cars and the story of the family that makes them. Ex-Formula 1 racer Enzo Ferrari (Driver) is struggling in 1957. He’s lost a son. He might lose his business, only a decade after forming it. And what do Michael Mann’s men love to do when they’re struggling? Go fast, live hard, suffer quietly. We get all that and some slick little cars going very fast. And wow, do they look crisp as they do so.
Take a look:
Driver is aged up here, silver foxed, and delivers the teaser’s only line of dialogue: “If you get into one of my cars, you get in to win.” And yes, the Gucci accent is back.
The driving looks spectacular, especially when lit by headlights and fog in a nighttime sequence, and the family drama between Ferrari and the women in his life (Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley) looks…passionate. It’s all based on Brock Yates’ biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine (adapted here by the writer of the original Italian Job, Troy Kennedy Martin), so expect lots of little historical details whenever Mann and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (also of The Killer!) stop ogling the vehicles. Look forward to it all crashing in a massive, emotionally repressed pile-up soon!
Ferrari hits theaters this Christmas.