Directed by Joseph Kosinski | Written by Kosinski and Ehren Kruger | ▲▲▲▲ | 155 min
If you’ve seen the trailer for this picture, you might’ve thought to yourself, “Hey, the grizzled veteran mentoring the young hotshot, a group of men embracing speed, intensity, and risking their lives for glory — this is just like Top Gun: Maverick.” No surprise then that director Kosinski helmed that movie, as well as a slick, well-assembled Tom Cruise science-fiction picture from 2013, Oblivion.
This movie actually has elements of both — this is a spectacular blockbuster that delivers high-impact kinetic thrills, a machine-tooled, A+ popcorn picture. This despite a predictable, exposition-ridden script where characters are prone to saying the most obvious stuff. None of that matters: F1 The Movie‘s big-budget, big-picture qualities — location work, cinematography, editing, and sound design — leaves all the nonsense in the dust.
Brad Pitt is Sonny Hayes, the grizzled racing veteran with a swarm of suspiciously millennial tattoos. He was an up-and-coming driver in the ’90s before a crash ended his career. His old buddy from those days, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), the owner of APXGP, a Formula One team bringing up the rear, tracks Sonny down and invites him to join the team in mid-season, frustrating and confounding everyone on it — including Kim Bodnia, Callie Cooke, Abdul Salis and Kerry Condon — and annoying the number one hotshot driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
My cinepanion at the IMAX screening was a Formula One fan — he pointed out the best drivers in the sport are in their early ’20s, making Pitt’s competitive status at his age the stuff of Hollywood hokum. Still, his impression was that the film does respect the sport, reminding us it’s a team competition that works with pace, crews looking to shave off fractions of seconds with every advantage they can wrangle, relying on bleeding edge technology and extraordinary timing to achieve any kind of success.
That said, F1The Movie will also have you believe that stone cold talent and a break-the-rules attitude are also key to winning, which is what “Old Man” Sonny brings. Pearce is threatened by his elder’s influence, even when Sonny crashes the car in his first spin around the track. It helps that Pearce’s mother, Bernadette (Sarah Niles, the therapist from Ted Lasso), keeps her son’s head on his shoulders, but it’s the sparks between the drivers that give the off-track scenes some gas, as does the work between Pitt and Bardem, and eventually between Pitt and Kerry Condon as the team’s technical director and lead’s romantic interest.
Are all these plot developments easily spotted coming down the track at us? Yes. Could this movie be more hokey in its notions of individual heroism outshining those team sport elements? No.
If Tom Cruise was in the Pitt role, can you imagine this as a late-arriving sequel to Days Of Thunder, Cruise’s post-Top Gun NASCAR picture? Absolutely. There are so many parallels to that movie here, for better and worse. But F1 The Movie works better than it did, even as Pitt’s character actually becomes more boring as the film gets more exciting.
That’s because the racing scenes are simply phenomenal and all Pitt can do is emote with his eyes through the helmet. This is the best argument for IMAX I’ve seen since the first Dune — Claudio Miranda’s camera, Stephen Mirrione’s fantastic work in the editing bays, and Hans Zimmer delivering a score that tastes like Reznor and Ross on Challengers, but with a deeper well of synths and Vangelis-era echoes.
This movie might be moderately improved with the addition of a real villain, maybe a cocky driver from another team who just can’t be beat. But where the rubber hits the road everything works better than it should, passing your critical faculties in the turns and somehow becoming the Rocky of racing movies. It’ll be an exceptional summer in cinemas if anything else even gets close to the entertainment value of this one.
