“Gran Turismo” is a beautiful looking film.

Jacques Jouffret photographed it like the slickest car commercial you’ve ever seen, and Austyn Daines and Colby Parker Jr. edited us right into and inside the race cars and the races recreated here.

It’s plays. It’s also damned entertaining. Don’t anybody tell you otherwise.

The script about plucky “gamer” underdog driving real race cars works, the production throws lots of whiz-bang effects at us — race cars digitally-assembling around our video gamer-turned-driver hero, and Neil Blomkamp — in a return to form — directs the hell out of it.

If you’re not into cars, racing or “the ultimate” race-simulation video game — “Gran Turismo” — if you’ve not opted to catch this is an enhanced-experience cinema (I saw it in a Regal 4DX seat/sound/air/lights/spray house), maybe you won’t be as impressed as I was.

It plays. Hell, I was worried about getting a ticket or burning out a clutch on the way home, for what that’s worth.

“Gran Turismo” is the first “video game movie” to have an actual real-world story to work with, of a “virtual” racing gamer turned into a real world LeMans/Nurburgring sports car Gran Turismo racer.

So the tropes almost write themselves.

Welsh lad Jann Mardengorough (Archie Madekwe) can never convince his retired-footballer dad (Djimon Hounsou) that he’s not “wasting” his life playing PlayStation’s “Gran Turismo.”

You’ve got the Nissan marketing whiz (Orlando Bloom) who figures a competition to put a “Gran Turismo” gaming champ behind the wheel of a competitive race could turn a generation that’s giving up on cars and the “driving” experience on to their sport and their brand.

And there’s David Harbour as the grousing, skeptical one-time-driver now race-car engineer and coach at a driving academy that will choose their Chosen One.

“This is NOT a game,” he barks. “I ‘m going to prove to you that you DON’T have what it takes!”

At a track/school with inspirational quotes from Dale Earnhardt and Colin McRae emblazened on its walls, 19 sedentary gamers from around the world are made to hit the gym and run laps as Harbour’s Jack Salter yells snide insults about their condition, scary descriptions of “g-forces” and “split-second” decisions and “killing yourself” or someone else with a mistake.

There’s something inspiring about the genuine meritocracy depicted here. If an arcade shows you punching out the fastest lap in the UK, US, Spain or wherever, you’re eligible.

The movie also gets a dig in at “press ready” and “marketing friendly” arguments pitched as considerations for who is “selected” to be backed for a season and a chance to get a racing license driving Nissan GTRs.

Nope. That’s not a meritocracy.

The college-age kid who emerges from this weeding-out competition gets his pre-race mellow on with Kenny G and Enya recordings, pines for a girl “back home” and has something to prove to his footballer father and brother, to his arch rival (Josh Stradowski) and the other drivers who dismiss “gamers,” and after his first big wreck, to himself.

Yes, it’s a familiar story arc, and yes there’s a lot of Sony Playstation and Nissan Nismo Racing love (advertising) in all this. But Blomkamp & Co. juice and goose the track scenes with a blur of tricks the “Fast & Furious” geezers will be copying, mark my words.

The film’s 2:15 pass by a lot faster than that.

Any movie that gives Hounsou a couple of great moments, pairs him up with ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell (as his wife, Jann’s Mum), gives Harbour’s big-screen career a reset and brings Orlando Bloom back from the dead can’t be bad.

Any picture that makes “Orinoco Flow” and smooth jazz a running gag, and the drink of kings a running incentive — “Champagne is for the PODIUM!” — is OK in my book.

My advice? See this in an enhanced, seat-shifting-and-shaking cinema, hold on to your beer (“Champagn is for the PODIUM!”) and give yourself over to “Gran Turismo,” a celebration of a game for the ages, a great “true” (ish) underdog story and a surprisingly fun popcorn picture at the end of a summer for the record books.

Rating: PG-13, racing violence, profanity

Cast: Archie Madekwe, David Harbour Orlando Bloom, Gerry Halliwell, Josh Stradowski, Takehiro Hira Thomas Kretschmann and Djimon Hounsou.

Credits: Directed by Neil Blomkamp, scripted by Jason Hall and Zach Baylin, based on the simulator/video game. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:15