Director: Joseph Kosinski
Stars: Brad Pitt, Kerry Condon, Damson Idris
Joseph Kosinski scored such a supreme hit in the summer of 2022 with Top Gun: Maverick that it’s no wonder he hunkered down with producer Jerry Bruckheimer and scribe Ehren Kruger to devise another blockbuster aimed squarely at the next deepest Dadcore entity out there: Formula 1. With corporate sponsorship up the yazoo and even the sport’s premier celebrity Lewis Hamilton onboard as a producer, the resulting movie rather unsubtly wears it’s registered trademark right there in the name. But hey, most studio movies are devised as product. This one’s just very up front about it.
F1® The Movie (god that’s a shit title) behaves very similarly to Top Gun: Maverick. So much so you might be forgiven for thinking that its the sequel to some early ’90s adrenaline pumper somehow obliterated from the IMDb. Here, Brad Pitt’s irksomely overconfident racing nomad Sonny Hayes fills in for the Maverick role; an old dog with a somewhat spurious reputation who’s corralled back into the upper echelons of an elite team to help teach the young kid on the block a thing or two. Or, at least, to get his old racing buddy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) out of a jam.
Said rising star is Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), an eager driver for flagging fictional F1 team APXGP. In many ways he’s the same as Sonny. Their competitive streaks are matched only by their identical childhood tragedies. What he lacks is discipline and patience. What Sonny brings to the table, seemingly, is an inexhaustible supply of underhand tactics to steer races in their favour. It’s a curious journey to take, one that depicts Formula 1 as a ruthless bubble of extreme wealth in which basically nobody has any scruples, so long as they get what they want. This extends to backroom tactics as Ruben faces sabotage from his own board members, who’d rather tank the team than keep him on as [insert job title here].
Where one might expect to see Joshua overcome adversity, to come of age in his sport, F1 spends a good portion of its opening hour suggesting the opposite, making the kid a superficial adversary for Pitt’s rogue-ish career racer. Opening with a popular Led Zeppelin cut and an older Hollywood star cracking wise at the young, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was Top Gear: The Movie. But things change-up as this overlong yet action-packed drama unfolds over the last eight races of the season. Sonny and Joshua jostle for pole position in the narrative, which occasionally swerves out of the centre lane, faking that it might be up to something surprising. Unfortunately, bold gambits are often reneged on.
It doesn’t help that Pitt’s Sonny remains, developmentally speaking, in the pit lane. The man we meet at the beginning is the same man who exits the movie. And maybe there’s something conversely stubborn about building a 2hr and 35 minute feature around a character who doesn’t learn, change or grow at all. Wormy board member Banning (Tobias Menzies) calls Sonny’s approach to driving ‘punk’ at some point. Is it possible no-character-development is also punk? A screenwriter’s “Fuck you”?
Fortunately, there’s at least one welcome surprise in the supporting roster. Kerry Condon’s aerodynamics engineer Kate McKenna is only marginally more substantive than your average blockbuster love interest, however you wouldn’t think so from Condon’s bright-eyed, quick-witted performance. She lights up the film, making much out of relatively little, often running circles around the two lads peacocking for a place on the podium.
But the real stars of F1® The Movie are the team immediately behind and in charge of the cameras, which present this daredevil sport from vantages rarely seen and on a scale to match. Car-mounted cameras swivel in sync. Along with smart intercutting to aerial views of the various tracks, Kosinski is able to engage even the uninitiated, maintaining a razor sharp focus on the stakes of a tussle for position happening at 300kph. The sense of G-force captured in Top Gun: Maverick isn’t lost here. It has us begging for an entire lap from the driver’s perspective; something we’re almost given in the movie’s true grace note – the final lap in Dubai at the movie’s crescendo. Here Kosinski and the team fly.
Plentiful shots of Pitt crammed into his helmet behind the wheel feel like a concerted effort to one-up his peer Tom Cruise. Pitt’s public reveal as a human dirtbag doesn’t do the movie many favours (I was a little reticent to even give it my cash), and for his part this feels like something of an excuse to play with some of his favourite toys. But one might argue it also metatextually informs a character we feel, from the off, is simply a bit of a selfish shit.
Otherwise, from the plentiful corporate sponsorship and industry cameos on down, this is a rather empty exercise in promotion; for Formula 1 and for Brad Pitt. It’s understandable why the latter might be seeking some rehabilitation at this point. Sonny isn’t the character to do it, however. He’s too egotistical and remorseless. As an advertisement for the sport, there’s enough jaw-drop spectacle here to create new converts. The purists might balk at the carnage Kosinski and Kruger let Sonny and co. get away with, mind. Kosinski probably comes out of this best, furthering the idea of a filmmaker who captures moments of exalting adrenaline better than anyone else presently. If only there were something substantive behind it this time.
The Lost Highway Hotel 