DAKAR: RACE AGAINST THE DESERT feels like a tease for a fuller experience — Moviejawn (2025)

Dakar: Race Against the Desert
Directed by Jalil Lespert
Featuring Carlos Sainz, Toby Price, Cristina Gutiérrez, Luciano Benavides
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Available digitally May 13

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor

I love motorsports. Formula 1 especially, (I once had a podcast dedicated to it) but I do love all forms of “let’s see how fast and how far we can push this machine to its limits.” From Ford v Ferrari (2019) to just Ferrari (2023), but also Days of Thunder (1990) and documentaries like Senna (2010), and of course, watching the real thing live. So when the press release for Dakar: Race Against the Desert came across my desk, I was eager to learn more about the Dakar Rally, a long distance race that happens over the course of two weeks.

The first thing I learned is that the Dakar Rally hasn’t begun or finished in Senegal since 2007. After leaving Africa for South America in 2009–the 2008 rally was cancelled because of the killing of French tourists in Mauritania by al-Qaeda affiliates–the race moved to Saudi Arabia after the Amaury Sport Organisation, the group that runs the rally (as well as other sporting events like the Tour de France) saw its relationships with a few South American governments deteriorating. So for the last few years, the Dakar rally has been entirely in Saudi Arabia, racing a route of over 5,000 miles through the desert and featuring a few different classes of vehicles: bikes, quads, cars, trucks, and UTVs, all of which are custom-built or extensively modified for enduring the harsh conditions.

Dakar: Race Against the Desert follows the 2023 running of the race and focuses on a few different drivers in the various classes. Most prominently featured are Kevin Benavides and Toby Price on bikes, Cristina Gutiérrez in the “light prototype” class, and Carlos Sainz and Nasser Al-Attiyah in the car class. All of these are interesting drivers (and seeing Carlos Sainz with his son, current F1 driver, is a treat for F1 fans), and they all have interesting stories. Benavides is a hungry young driver, while Price sees the 2023 rally as potentially his last attempt to win. Gutiérrez faces challenges for being one of the few women in the sport, while Sainz and Al-Attiyah are trying to leave their legacies intact.

All of these are interesting stories and worth spotlighting. Why these drivers would undertake this challenge and the difficulties in actually completing this epic rally are interesting things to explore. Plus, all of the race footage captured by the production is genuinely great. If your adrenaline doesn’t kick in when you see a massive car jump a sand dune, this definitely isn’t the film for you.

I will note that this film was produced by Red Bull Studios, so their teams are the most prominently featured, and it might feel like this gives a limited view of the competition, but this is actually the documentary’s second biggest problem. Trying to tell the stories of each of these drivers, with backstories, tracking them through the two week long, 5,000 mile race, showing actual racing, and showing where they all finish, not to mention explaining enough of the rules and context to follow all that is simply too much for the film’s 85 runtime. This may have been better suited to a docuseries, giving each driver or class their own episode, or with each installment focusing on a different portion of the race. While this is a fun watch and a great place to learn about the Dakar Rally, it feels like the highlights more than it feels like a full story, which robs the audience of making an emotional connection with the featured drivers and teams. Drive to Survive isn’t perfect, but the Netflix series is still the template to beat when it comes to creating the kind of stickiness that lasts long beyond its running time.

Support Ryan Silberstein