I was really looking forward to watching this film, but I was disappointed about how Mangold directed it, some overacting, and a too melodramatic script.

First, the director expects us to believe that two race car drivers will drive side-by-side giving each other the evil eye while careening down the straight at 210 miles per hour. Better yet, in some early scenes they shout at each other in their open-top race cars, as if they could be heard over the sound of the engines. Mangold also channels Ben-Hur's chariot race, with cars nudging each other sideways. During the Le Mans race, he cuts away multiple times to driver Miles' wife and child watching the event on TV. I'm sorry, but no network then or now would televise a 24-hour race in its entirety. I can almost hear the laughter of anyone in the racing industry who watched all the absurdities (I am sure they would have a longer list than this one).

Next, the director did not rein in the outrageous overacting by Christian Bale as Miles. Add in the demonic glowering of Letts as Henry Ford and you have a cartoon, not a well-conceived treatment of an historical event for American racing. As is par for the course with these testosterone-driven movies, the female characters are destined to be background cheerleaders for their men; in this one, there's only one of them.

Equal blame then to the scriptwriters, who came up with a predictable plot line in the best (or worst?) tradition of American melodrama. We have the bad guys (Ford and Beebe) and the good guys (Shelby and Miles), and everyone else is window dressing. Not a shred of nuance here, which should be an insult to the moviegoer, but I guess the bar has been set pretty low for decades now.

The racing scenes themselves are well-filmed, with lots of low-angle shots that create even more of a feel of being there. A lot of viewers want explosions, and you get more than your fair share of those here -- maybe too many to be realistic.

It's unfortunate that in a film of almost epic length you don't get a good exposition of the friendship of Miles and Shelby. Unless I'm wrong, and it just consisted of a lot of bantering and occasional meaningful looks.