Ford v Ferrari is a crowd pleaser. If you like boardroom shouting matches and cars that go vroom vroom then, boy, do I have the movie for you!

James Mangold helms this sports drama about the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966, and Christian Bale plays cantankerous English driver Ken Miles, whose driving skill and temper are unmatched. That causes problems for his boss, fair-tempered good ol' American underdog Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), who promises the Ford Motor Company they will sell more cars if they beat Ferrari in an endurance race.

Miles is reluctant at first (152-minute runtime needs filler), but Shelby convinces him anyway. Bale-and-Damon suddenly feels like Bale-and-Wahlberg, where two actors at the top of their game are constantly bickering like an old married couple and break up multiple times. (The Academy loves this stuff.) Things go well until the ultimate modern-day supervillain "corporate marketing dude" Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas) shows up and starts creating all sorts of obstacles, but he's the butt of every joke so we kind of let him go. Lucas' performance is actually so good, years from now we'll be talking about how he's "that guy" from all those biographical movies. (Glory Road is classic).

I also feel bad for Caitriona Balfe, who plays Ken's wife. She gets plenty of screen time but I'm not convinced she really changes the characters or the plot all that much. There's one bizarre sequence where she's trying to get a straight out answer out of Ken (classic domestic problem), and in doing so threatens to drive like a maniac, which somehow manages to petrify her reckless professional driver husband. She runs the shop (she's smart), she raises their kid (she's capable) and she doesn't put up with the boys’ antics (she's tough). She has no adversary, so there isn't a really interesting character there.

If Walk the Line was panned for being a solid but profoundly clichéd film, then Ford v Ferrari should be similarly panned. There's nothing to really dislike about this decent film, but if you're looking for some deeper philosophy on how close racing is to death, why egos get so huge, Italians vs. Americans, old vs. new, risky vs. safe, etc. etc. then Mangold's not very interested in discussing it. If we could somehow bring in the character dynamics from Rush and combined them with Bale and Damon and the Mangold's racing sequences, we'd have a damn good racing epic drama.

If you can catch this in a big theatre, I totally recommend it, because the sound design is pretty darn great. There's plenty of training laps, practice laps and race laps to keep you gripped to your seat, and I appreciate some of the angles Mangold manages to get. The cinematographer is Phedon Papamichael, who also worked with Mangold on Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma. The attention to detail is really good and they nail down the era’s look perfectly.

It should be good enough to get a few nominations but curiously, both Damon and Bale are running in the Best Actor category; it's common for a film with co-leads to pick one for Best Actor and the other for Best Supporting Actor instead. I think Mangold's a solid director who makes really thoughtful and dramatic films, but he lacks the element of surprise that makes you go "wow."

Ford v Ferrari gets three stars out of four.