By Jared Rasic
There’s nothing that wrong with F1, the new film from Joseph Kosinski, the mastermind behind Top Gun: Maverick, Tron: Legacy and a few other films without colons.
As someone with less than zero interest in Formula One racing, I found myself invested in the story, while still wishing the film would paint outside the lines of the racing movie formula. But, in a way, that’s also what Kosinski did so brilliantly with Maverick: He took a predictable story and made it ridiculously entertaining anyway. F1 is more of the same.
Brad Pitt (who is living his best life in his Robert Redford era) plays Sonny Hayes, an aging and nomadic racer-for-hire who was, once upon a time, an F1 prodigy before a fiery crash left him without a career or a wife, and deeply addicted to gambling. When old friend Ruben Cervantes (the always welcome Javier Bardem) brings him into his struggling F1 team, APXGP, the difficult Hayes must partner with Joshua Pierce (rising star Damson Idris), a brash and egotistical rookie who immediately butts heads with Hayes.
While it’s entertaining to watch Pitt and Idris clash egos, the real star of the movie is the racing, which involves the actors driving the cars (mostly) themselves with multiple small cameras and microphones stashed inside. Just as in Maverick, the audience very much feels like it’s inside the plane/car with them, going insanely fast. I found F1 slightly less thrilling than Maverick simply because being in the sky is more exciting to me than being on a race track. Your, ahem, mileage may vary.
I was overjoyed to see Kerry Condon (robbed for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for The Banshees of Inisherin) as Kate McKenna, the technical director for APXGP team and love interest for Brad Pitt. I’m hoping this role bumps her into another stratosphere as an actress since she has long been one of the finest (and most underrated) performers of her generation. F1 ultimately does her character a disservice because the script becomes so invested in the romance between Kate and Sonny that it stops treating her like a genius designer and engineer and more like a stereotypical love interest. Condon can and will do better than this. She is one of the greats.
Still, if you’re into Formula One and racing movies, it’s absurdly entertaining watching Pitt and Idris doing what appears to be a lot of their own driving. At the end of the day, when movies hit all the stereotypical sport movie beats, it can be comforting (looking at you, Creed). Still, Kosinski is a hell of a filmmaker and there’s a breathtaking kineticism to the dance between his cameras and the cars, even as the characters and dialogue fail to transcend the genre.
F1 is the definition of a crowd-pleasing summer blockbuster, complete with a larger-than-life movie star, a backstage pass into a world we don’t know much about, exciting races, a cute love story and a hero’s journey straight out of Joseph Campbell’s playbook. While there’s nothing new here aside from how some of the racing is filmed, the tropes are handled expertly by filmmakers who know what a mass audience wants to see with their family in tow.
Can I nitpick the movie to death? Sure. Does the film play like a commercial for F1 racing? Absolutely. Will most people care? Not even a little.
