A grizzled racer-for-hire returns to Formula One decades after a life-changing accident in this new blockbuster from Joseph Kosinski.
When a racing movie makes a pit stop on multiplex screens, the results always catch the eye of critics or general audiences through an extensive coverage of the industry, from the Tom Cruise cult hit Days of Thunder and the winner of multiple Oscars Ford v. Ferrari to the James Hunt biopic Rush and the recent video game adaptation Gran Turismo. After surprising audiences with a compelling character-driven spectacle in Top Gun: Maverick, Joseph Kosinski aims to achieve similar success in the racing movie niche with F1®:The Movie, which despite some familiarity, amounts to a spectacular popcorn blockbuster perfect for the summer movie season.
Brad Pitt leads F1®:The Movie as fictional racer-for-hire Sonny Hayes, a former phenom in the high-class Formula 1 racing league who failed to fill his father’s shoes and wound up dubbed ‘the greatest that never was’ after a major accident almost ended his career. After substituting in an IndyCar race thirty years later, Hayes is greeted by his former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) and is invited to join his struggling F1 racing team APXGP (short for Apex Grand Prix).
Hayes accepts his request and comes out of retirement to travel across the pond, only to get off on the wrong foot with his promising rookie teammate Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris), technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), principal Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), and board of directors member Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies) via his reckless methods of getting ahead on the race track. Can Hayes and his new team co-exist in enough time to rescue APXGP from bankruptcy and a looming sale?
The answer may be easy to surmise given the subgenre in which F1®:The Movie, happens to be, but the journey is constantly thrilling thanks to incredibly crafted racing sequences. Kosinski covers each race Hayes and company compete in with a multitude of camera setups that perfectly replicates how an F1 race appears on television or in a video game, but the filmmaking elements that make this cinematic are the closeup shots of Hayes and Pearce’s faces as they pilot their cars and the reverse-shot that assumes their first-person points of view, while the emotional investment is amplified with reaction shots of Cervantes, McKenna and the pit crew.
Each rally is impeccably put together both in production and the editing room with expert pacing, and the addition of a PA announcer making calls that ring all over the arena which do an excellent job of describing the articulate details of F1 racing as they happen, like an instance where Hayes has to adjust the back wing of his vehicle in order to gain more speed. The casual audience member going into this with no idea of what F1 is or what makes it different from IndyCar and NASCAR will leave this movie with enough of an understanding of the terminology and strategy that goes into a given race to become a newfound fan of the sport.
F1®:The Movie is also sleek and stylish as far as visuals are concerned whether a scene peruses an upscale club in which Pearce and his manager spend a night, or on a racetrack as the glossy F1 automobiles speed past each other so fast it’s often difficult to determine how much computer generated effects were used to render them, if any. And the audio mixing is also stellar in conveying the loudness and speed of a racing circuit, so much so that Hans Zimmer’s incredible score merges beautifully with the sound effects, implementing synthesizers reminiscent of Reznor and Ross amongst his usual bombastic orchestra.
The dynamic between the two main teammates is also well written; Sonny Hayes and Joshua Pearce trade barbs about the former’s old age and the latter’s big ego with concise dialogue bolstered by both actors’ sharp timing, while also making their contrasting styles of training a recurring visual motif throughout F1®:The Movie; Hayes runs around the APXGP race track every morning while Pearce commits to the latest in treadmill technology that connects tubes and wires all over his body to machines that keep accurate track of his physical condition. And in a career full of great performances, Brad Pitt puts in solid work here as Sonny Hayes, displaying his standard cool nonchalance by shrugging off nosy questions from the press, while showing vulnerability by his lonesome in the film’s more private moments.
F1®:The Movie is everything the average viewer would want from a summer blockbuster, but it does contain a lot of the usual twists and turns that have appeared in the standard sports movie, and despite some surprise developments that up the stakes of the climactic race, the more seasoned moviegoers can probably guess how it ends. It’s also worth noting that some of the early dialogue scenes try to match the frantic editing style of the racing sequences unnecessarily, and the results create a headache-inducing overcompensation.
There are also some inklings of thematic ideas about the true measure of a man like the superior Top Gun: Maverick had to powerful effect, but they sadly don’t stick the landing to say anything meaningful by the end of the movie. There’s nothing wrong with aiming to entertain, however, and Kosinski’s latest does just that. Audiences will be enthralled in wonder over the races, endeared by the relationships Sonny forms with everyone in APXGP, and become newfound fans of racing no matter the league. It tells a familiar story in a world unfamiliar to many, and that’s why everyone should see F1®:The Movie as soon as the green flag flies.