Review: ‘Faster Horse’ documentary about Ford Mustang never gets in gear

For a documentary all about the iconic Ford Mustang, “A Faster Horse” is seriously lacking zip.

As a chronicle of the painstaking five-year-process involved in the 2015 redesign, and as a 50th anniversary celebration of the car’s introduction, the film certainly has a photogenic subject, what with screen credits that include “Goldfinger,” “Bullitt” and several installments of “The Fast and the Furious.”

The film’s account of the redesign closely shadows chief program engineer Dave Pericak and his team in Dearborn, Mich. That all feels geared chiefly toward car enthusiasts, but the legend and lore surrounding the Mustang pack a broader potential.

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Spearheaded by Lee Iacocca, the slick uber-salesman who contended that the new pony-car class would appeal to an untapped younger market, the Mustang wasn’t exactly instantly embraced by Henry Ford II, still smarting over his company’s Edsel debacle.

Director David Gelb, whose previous nonfiction effort was the well-received “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” ensures that his latest vehicle rolls off the doc assembly line with all the usual specs — corporate archival footage, vintage commercials and those action movie clips. But the whole package, with its bizarre fondness for slow motion, feels correspondingly sluggish.

All the components are here, but “A Faster Horse” cries out for more dynamic performance.

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“A Faster Horse.”

No MPAA rating.

Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

Playing: AMC Burbank 16.

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