‘F1: The Movie’ Review

See the cars. The cars go fast!

Brad Pitt in F1: The Movie. (MovieStillsDB)

Joseph Kosinski’s F1: The Movie is very much in line with the director’s previous efforts, Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, in that it pairs big, expansive visuals with a big, expansive soundscape, the combination of which sometimes makes the resultant movie feel more like a feature-length music video than a proper film.

Brad Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a nomadic racecar driver trying to hold on to his love for the combination of intense speed and chassis-to-chassis combat that comprises his driving style. I’ll get to him in a minute. Because in many ways, this feels like composer Hans Zimmer’s movie: He infuses his big, brassy, percussive bombast—that signature maximal-minimalism style of his that’s omnipresent without being flowery—with a pulsating house-music, EDM sound. It’s a perfect accompaniment for the most Eurotrash of all sports, F1.¹

Given how much of this movie involves driving and training to drive, a killer score was of enormous importance—no one wants to be stuck in a car without some tunes to kill the time—and Zimmer delivered, even if this isn’t quite the standalone achievement of, say, Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy score.

You need that score if, like me, you don’t really care all that much about Formula One or car racing in general. Fortunately, car racing is second only to boxing as a cinematic sport; there’s something inherently gripping about cars zooming around a track at 200 miles per hour, the squeal of tires and crunch of fenders punctuating the back and forth on the leaderboard. Formula One combines gladiatorial combat with team strategy to pleasing effect. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who cowrote with Kosinski, understands that this movie has to work for the novice, like me, so every sequence is laboriously explained, from pit stops to point systems, in a way that may annoy the Formula One faithful but kept me just barely informed enough to follow what was happening.

What’s happening is that Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), the head of APXGP, desperately needs a win or his board is going to can him, because they’ve earned zero points on the season. If he gets a win, he secures three more years. No win, and he’s out. The stakes thus set, Ruben asks former prodigy Sonny Hayes (good name) to take rookie prodigy Joshua “JP” Pearce (Damson Idris) under his wing and do whatever he can to win them a race so he doesn’t lose his Gucci suit. A win will also prove that Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the first female technical director in F1 history, deserves to be there. So many chips on so many shoulders that only the aerodynamics of an open cockpit can blow away.

F1: The Movie. (MovieStillsDB)

Okay, back to Brad. F1: The Movie is one of those movie-star movies that seem to be vanishing. There are probably other actors who could have pulled off Sonny Hayes’s particular blend of aging insouciant confidence, and there are definitely other actors who pull off his brand of buttoned-down, California-burnt Midwest sex appeal. But there are very few who can make you believe the two exist in tandem all while simultaneously making you believe that he’s doing everyone else a favor just by being there. Pitt’s always been an underrated eye actor—widening and narrowing to simulate thought; warmly smiling with them—and Kosinski took full advantage of the enormous IMAX frame to highlight just how good he is at it, never shooting in medium when he can shoot up tight.

Kerry Condon is also wonderful, and it makes me so happy to see her continuing her run of good work that began with The Banshees of Inisherin and continued through In the Land of Saints and Sinners. One imagines she’ll be an awards contender later in the year for Train Dreams, which is getting a big push from Netflix, but until then it’s nice to see her have some fun as Sonny’s love interest here.

And look: pulsing score, star power, whatever. Kosinski shoots the races up close and personal, making good use of the IMAX aspect ratio and putting audiences in the cockpit alongside Sonny and JP. It’s almost overwhelming, at times, just power cinema that makes you feel as though you’re jostling with the guys on the track. Again, I don’t really care about F1—there are references aplenty in this movie that went a mile over my head—but I do like fast cars and I do like the sensation of being inside them while they go fast. F1: The Movie cost a reported $300 million and you can see the money on the screen in the form of real cars really flying around real tracks. Whatever the film lacks in human drama—and, honestly, it’s pretty rote—it makes up for in asphalt-scorching bombast.

1. At one point, we see a race kicked off by a lady DJ dancing behind her digital turntables above the track, and I was just like “yeah, that all tracks.”