Movie Review – F1
Principal Cast : Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Sarah Niles, Will Merrick, Joseph Balderrama, Abdul Salis, Callie Cooke, Samson Kayo, Simon Kunz, Liz Kingsman, Luciano Bacheta, Shea Whigham, Kyle Rankin.
Synopsis: A Formula One driver comes out of retirement to mentor and team up with a younger driver.
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A thunderous mix of cheeseball sport tropes – not just a few, but quite literally all of them – coupled with boilerplate characters, plotting and dialogue, mixed to the pulsating genetic structure of both Top Gun: Maverick and Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder, Brad Pitt and Oblivion director Joseph Kosinski rattle the speaker system of the local multiplexes with this high-octane fantasy version of Formula 1, the open-wheeled racing code currently finding a resurgence in popularity across the globe thanks, largely, to Netflix’ docu-series Drive To Survive. Boasting some state-of-the-art cinematography and Brad Pitt’s admittedly white-hot screen presence, the aptly named F1 is a grossly insular, yet well mounted excitement offensive trading heavily on fan enthusiasm, but less so on bringing new people into the sport. Pitt’s rugged older-hero role notwithstanding, the film is almost entirely empty calories, trying desperately to say something about the fleet-footedness and fickleness of modern fame, as well as the incredibly fickle nature of Formula 1 drivers and teams, but loses steam when thinking about what’s going on for more than a couple of seconds.
Pitt plays former Formula 1 racing prodigy Sonny Hayes, now living a nomadic lifestyle as a driver-for-hire across the globe, who is recruited by APXGP F1 team principal (and former teammate) Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to join their team in a Hail Mary to rescue it from sporting oblivion. Hayes joins the teams other driver, the arrogant youngster Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who sees Hayes as a has-been (or, as quoted in the film, a “never was”), aiming to have the older driver booted from the team as soon as possible. However, thanks to a developing rapport between Hayes and the teams chief technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the team begins to find its feet in the wider Formula 1 racing calendar, despite the duplicitous machinations of board member Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), eventually closing in on a long-held dream of even obtaining a podium finish.
F1 – marketed in a variety of territories as F1 The Movie – is a Hollywood fiction of what the real Formula 1 racing is all about. The film’s high energy and absurd flexibility with physics, realism and actual tactics make it a perfect summer blockbuster that showcases the sport’s potential for new fans, and satiating the wildest dreams of aficionados to a point, if that point is gross ridiculousness. Nothing about F1 is accurate, nor is it a study of the rigors and legitimate racing, leaning more into the infantilised version of open-wheel racing espoused by the likes of Sylvester Stallone’s Driven. But where F1 fails as a truth telling of Formula 1 the sport, it pedestals itself as a champion of The Great American Sporting Movie, and in this instance it’s an outstanding success. Indeed, I alluded to Days of Thunder beforehand – this film is to Formula 1 as that film is to stock car racing: an impressionistic fantasy that cobbles realism for cinematic joie de vivre. F1 could have made a mockery of the whole sport, but Kosinski – perhaps recognising the inherent problems with the kind of pursuit Formula 1 is in terms of a cinematic storyline – jettisons a lot of possibilities and hones in on a single team within the wider racing industry.
The film’s legion of producers, of whom a large proportion are real Formula 1 drivers and team principals/owners, have taken the most exciting aspects of the sport and crafted an easily digestible narrative and simplistic roster of characters with which to present the film. The film almost goes out of its way to avoid mentioning any other Formula 1 team specifically, unless required to by the plot (Pierre Gasly gets an unfortunate mention, as does Nico Hulkenberg), while a key plot point seems lifted directly from Romain Grosjean’s fiery crash at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix to add some extra juice to the tension; it’s a crib-notes version of Formula 1 racing with widescreen lenses and bombastic Dolby Atmos sound, filtered through Hans Zimmer’s appropriately overblown score. It’s telling when the opening notes to Zimmer’s music here could be swapped out for his metal guitar work on Days Of Thunder almost beat for beat.
It fits that Kosinksi and Transformers scribe Ehren Kruger, notable for stopping Age of Extinction for ten minutes to explain away a man having sex with an underage girl, have dulled the dialogue down to its dumbest form, also utilising Sky Sports commentators David Croft and Martin Brundle as voice-overs throughout the film to explain the racing architecture to newbies. This itself is a cliché in sports movies, using the commentary voiceover technique to enhance explanation or amp up excitement, and while the idea of listening to Crofty vocally orgasm in surround sound every five or so minutes throughout this two hour festival of speed made me a touch uneasy, the hype the film exuded was palpable. Kruger’s inane dialogue and fatuous “character development” is astoundingly dire when you think hard about it later, but the good-natured malarkey of Brad Pitt’s enigmatic acting style opposite Kerry Condon’s sheer earnestness as the “first female technical director of an F1 team” phone-in overcome a lot of iffy words and overblown subtext. This isn’t a film of subtlety, and the various arcs enacted by the various leading characters can be seen coming and going a mile away. There’s a minor encounter with an inept female pit crew member that has potential to be some kind of catalyst for personal growth, but the film shelves the arc mid-film in favour of keeping the cars moving fast. Poor Damson Idris (Outside the Wire) has the ignominy of playing the upstart youngster of the F1 world, all piss and vinegar and attitude, with a hopeless PR man by his side, who, as one might imagine, is always going to have his attitude adjusted in a variety of ways throughout the film. It’s obvious as all hell, and played with vast simplicity by Joseph Kosinksi’s direction – leaving the actor flailing about in a role that almost entirely meaningless. Still, we have a good laugh, right?
And that’s the point about F1. It’s silly as hell, cheesy and corny and often quite stupid, and almost always predictable. But it’s still a hell of a lot of fun, if only for the empty-calorie intake of unintellectual stimulation masquerading as serious racing. This isn’t a serious film, but you kinda feel like Kosinski and his team wanted it to be. They understand what sells popcorn and by God they lean into the sporting film tropes, clichés and archetypes. The smattering of real Formula 1 cameos littering this film are both cringeworthy and expected from a film serving almost entirely as an advertisement to the sport, but unlike Oliver Stone’s NFL-themed Any Given Sunday, which had to create entirely fictional teams for Al Pacino to give us his “game of inches” speech, Kosinski and the production had access to the real thing – filmed at real Formula 1 racing weekends across the 2023 and 2024 seasons, the film has a mixture of wanting to retain realism but needing to drift into fantasy throughout the copious circuit-bound action.
The film feels too small within itself to legitimise the story – lacking an honest on-track villain is a key problem the film can’t escape – and without Pitt or Idris really interacting meaningfully with another team (fictional or otherwise), they really are just playing in their own sandpit for a lot of the story. Give Pitt a real antagonist! Have Verstappen body him as they’re on the starting grid, or make (co-producer) seven time world champion Lewis Hamilton be a genuine race threat at some point. Something to generate some grit within the film’s shallow plot. Instead, we have backroom bureaucracy trying to bring the team down, not on-track performance. Nobody wants to see that, not really. The fact that F1 doesn’t embrace the real combat of Formula 1 racing in the manner fans want to see, makes this a lesser film. It’s still engaging and has a boatload of thrills and charm, but I genuinely feel it was a missed opportunity to grab newcomers to the sport in a more profound way. As it stands, F1 is a solid crowd-pleaser that delivers what it says on the tin, thanks largely to Brad Pitt’s ability to make even the dumbest lines of dialogue feel authentic, but as a sporting movie of any profundity this one misses the podium by a wide chicane.
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