Born to Race Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Born to Race Blu-ray Movie Review

Teenage Angst Meets NASCAR Porn

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 14, 2012

One participant likens Born to Race to Footloose, but the film's true progenitor is The Karate Kid. Just as in the 1984 classic, a discontent high school kid moves to a new town and school, where he is instantly targeted by the local hotshot and his crew. Their rivalry is partly over a girl and partly over dominance in a sport, and it's mirrored by a rivalry between two adult mentors. The critical difference here is that it's all about cars.

Born to Race was written by Steve Sarno, Ali Afshar and director Alex Ranarivelo. All of them are NASCAR fanatics, and Afshar is the founder and president of a racing team and has raced for Subaru. (Not coincidentally, the car driven by the film's hero is also a Subaru.) Ranarivelo was a street racer as a kid and had worked with Sarno on a short film partly based on his experiences. They wanted to make a racing movie featuring real machines performing actual feats of precision driving, but they couldn't interest a major studio, where the only kind of car movie anyone wanted to hear about was an over-the-top extravaganza like The Fast and the Furious (and its many sequels). It took eight years for the team to find financing, and the resulting film went direct to video.

But "direct to video" doesn't have the stigma it used to, not when so much of what studio machines pump into muliplexes each weeks dies a quick and ignominious death. Born to Race is no masterpiece, but it's a solidly constructed genre film with capable performances, interesting visuals and a uniquely varied array of automotive hardware. With this fine Blu-ray presentation, you can watch it at home and bring your own popcorn.

Danny Krueger (Joseph Cross) was literally "born" to race. His father, Frank (busy character actor John Pyper-Ferguson), was a top NASCAR driver until he was crippled in a wreck, sending him into a downward alcoholic spiral that cost him his marriage. Now in high school, Danny lives in Encino, California, with his mother, Lisa (Sherry Stringfield), and stepfather, Joe (Matt McCoy), where he's made headlines for winning a prestigious racing fellowship. A month later, Danny loses the fellowship after crashing the sponsor's car in an illegal street race.

Lisa sends her son to live with his father, who has sobered up and is running an auto repair shop in Bradford, California. Like Daniel-san in The Karate Kid, this Danny find the new environment less than welcoming. Bradford people are strong supporters of American cars, which makes Danny's fuel-injected Subaru anathema to everyone except a few "rice burner" geeks like Max (Spencer Breslin) and Harry (Whitmer Thomas) ("rice burner" being a derogatory term for cars made in Japan).

The big fish in this small pond is Jake Kendall (Brando Eaton), who drives a Mustang and has two "lieutenants", Clint and Sanchez (Erik Sords and Michael Esparza) following him around like puppy dogs. Jake's father, Jimmy (Grant Show), owns a huge auto parts store and—wouldn't you know it?—is a former racing rival of Danny's father. Put this bunch together in the high school's auto shop, and it's all the instructor, Briggs, can do to prevent mayhem. (Briggs is played by Erik King, whom fans of Dexter will recognize as Sgt. Doakes, the only cop in Miami Metro who saw through Dexter's mild-mannered exterior to the monster beneath. Naturally, Doakes ended up dead.)

Of course, there's a girl: Jessica (Nicole Badaan), who, like Danny, only recently moved to Bradford from elsewhere. But Jessica has a rich stepfather and lives in a big house, all of which gives her a potential entree to the in-crowd. Then again, she drives a Porsche, marking her as a potential outsider among Bradford's American car fanatics. Jake tried dating her, but Jessica quickly spotted him for a jerk. A confrontation between Danny and Jake at a party at Jessica's house cements the rivalry between them; it also results in a car chase in which Danny's Subaru outruns Jake's Mustang. Now it's war.

The film builds toward a drag racing tournament instead of a karate competition, but the principle is the same. At stake are both bragging rights and a coveted scholarship. To get to the tournament, the estranged father and son have to bridge the gulf that divides them and work together, and they have to survive some dirty tricks deployed by the Kendall family, who, for all their bravado, are still terrified of going up against a Krueger.

The tournament itself is a bravura display of rubber and metal. Even if you're not an afficionado (and I know next to nothing about drag-racing), you can't help but be impressed by the sheer variety of highly engineered machinery that director Ranarivelo sends hurtling back and forth across the screen, all the while building toward the final showdown between Danny and Jake. The film's conclusion may be somewhat over the top, in both sentiment and action, but it's certainly crowd-pleasing.

Born to Race Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Appropriately for a film about a sport that most people now watch on high-definition TV, Born to Race was shot with Red One digital cameras, and the resulting image on Arc Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray reflects the usual virtues of that capture format: clean, sharply delineated visuals; superb depth of field; solid black levels and shadow detail. Colors are vivid and well-saturated, but not overly so; in general, the most distinctive colors are reserved for the cars, which are, after all, the real stars of the film. As is almost always the case with digitally originated films, issues such as high frequency filtering and artificial sharpening are non-existent, and a BD-25 is more than sufficient to accommodate this 99-minute film without compression artifacts, given the relatively limited extras.

Born to Race Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The same desire for authenticity that informs the film's treatment of racing is also evident on the soundtrack. The refined and carefully maintained autos in this film make sounds that are distinctive and loud and reach down into the lower ranges, but they're not routinely amped up to the point of blowing you out of your seat. Real engines, if they're well-tuned, don't sound like that; they just throb with power, and so will your subwoofer. When appropriate, the DTS-HD MA 5.1 track offers a subtle sense of being surrounded by the noise of engines, and in the long sequence at the track that concludes the film, there's almost always something happening in the distance. Dialogue is always clear (not that it's especially novel or challenging), and the underscore by Jamie Christopherson (who, appropriately enough, writes a lot of music for video games) is sufficiently unobtrusive to pass almost unnoticed.

Born to Race Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Behind the Scenes (HD, 720p; 1.78:1; 5:56): Interviews with the filmmakers chart the history of the project and their goals for the film. Interviewees include Sarno, Afshar and Ranarivelo; producer George Shamieh; and actors Eaton, Thomas and Badaan.


• Getting It Right (HD, 720p; 1.78:1; 3:00): The efforts to achieve automotive authenticity.


• The Players (HD, 720p; 1.78:1; 3:44): The filmmakers praise the cast. Unfortunately, there are no additional cast interviews.


• Bonus Trailers: At startup, the disc plays trailers for Senna and 96 Minutes. These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Born to Race Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

For all its virtues, The Karate Kid would not have become a classic without the late Pat Morita's iconic performance as Daniel-san's karate teacher and surrogate father, Mr. Miyagi. Born to Race has no such performance and, indeed, no such character. In place of the unassuming building superintendent with secret powers and an unknown past, Danny Krueger has a real father whose powers and past are all too familiar all over town. It's not training in cars that Danny needs from Frank; it's training in life (which is what Mr. Miyagi really had to offer, disguised as karate lessons). Born to Race will never become a classic, but it's an entertaining variation on a formula that hasn't grown old, and racing enthusiasts should get an additional charge out of the hardware on display. Recommended.