F1, the thunderous (read: loud) new Brad Pitt racing movie, is really two vehicles—one built for its star, the other for the track. It performs better in the first lane. Director Joseph Kosinski, who launched Top Gun: Maverick to a $1.5 billion global box office and helmed the underrated Only the Brave, this time doesn’t have much gas in the tank. It’s a reminder that even a capable director and a photogenic movie star can only take a shopworn formula so far—and not quite to the checkered flag.
Audiences craving popcorn entertainment probably won’t mind that F1 runs on used tires: the well-worn dynamic of the brooding veteran and the cocky upstart, complete with forced mentorship arcs, manufactured crises and the inevitable reconciliation en route to The Big Win. And all of it is stretched across a bloated 155 minutes. Two reheated hours wouldn’t have done?
Sonny Hayes is a character we’ve met before—repeatedly—but he fits Pitt like custom racing suit. Once a golden boy of the track, aging Sonny now lives in a van and doesn’t chase trophies as much as the fleeting “peace” racing offers him. He’s still haunted, naturally, by a career-defining crash, and yes, there’s a medical scare lurking near the final lap.
After Sonny wins the Daytona 500 in the opening stretch, his old pal Ruben (Javier Bardem), now heading a failing Formula 1 team and drowning in $350 million of debt, convinces him to return. Barely a scene later, Sonny is predictably clashing with the team’s hotshot rookie, Joshua Pearce (a solid Damson Idris), who is of course talented but arrogant, and without a team ethic. The silly script offers this relationship little more than an array of scenes where Sonny and Joshua butt heads and a couple “let’s work together” beats. Joshua’s mother (Ted Lasso’s Sarah Niles) turns up long enough to perfunctorily lecture Sonny about safety protocols.
Meanwhile, the always-excellent Kerry Condon plays the team’s “technical advisor,” juggling car design, track strategy and real-time crisis control, even making time for an unbelievable and obligatory romance with Pitt. An appealing, quiet moment between them on a Vegas balcony hints at emotional depth the film never gets around to. Like Condon, Bardem spends most of the runtime trying to inject life into a character the script forgets to write.
To say more about the recycled story would be pointless, and complaining feels beside the point—F1 isn’t trying to surprise anyone. Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger don’t bother swerving around clichés in a film that feels like the output of a standard AI prompt: “Write a summer blockbuster in the Tom Cruise mold.”
But the engaging Pitt isn’t quite Cruise, who all but patented this formula. That’s not a knock—Pitt is effortlessly likable, still absurdly handsome at 61 and can charm his way through just about anything (even to an Oscar for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). But where Cruise runs on adrenaline, Pitt merely, well, cruises. And since his Sonny is in reflective, late-career mode, this posture works fine thematically even if Pitt never adds much urgency, even when the engines are roaring.
As for those engines, whether F1 crosses the finish line for you may depend on how thrilling you find the racing, which interrupts the story every ten minutes or so (or is it the other way around?). For this writer they were a letdown, though I did love the three-second pit stop. Shot by Oscar-winner Claudio Miranda (Top Gun: Maverick, Life of Pi) with elaborate, precision camerawork, the races are sleek, sure, but they often feel remote. While we get wide shots of the track, close-ups of the drivers and cars whizzing past each other, but good luck telling who’s as everything zooms in circles. It’s fast. It’s expensive. And it’s oddly dull after the first race or two.
The narrow-cast screenplay offers no rivalries, no villains and no subplots. Unlike Rush or Ford v Ferrari, the stakes hardly escalate; consequently, the repetition wears thin. An effective if brief final stretch flirts with something deeper as Sonny seems to achieve that elusive sense of peace—but it’s too little, too late.
As a summer movie, F1 runs the same old laps. From its first reel you’ll know exactly where this overlong ride is heading. I suspect many, distracted by the style, the noise, the sheer volume of it all, won’t mind. I did.
2 stars
