F1: The Movie (dir. Joseph Kosinski)

Director(s): Joseph Kosinski
Country: United States
Author: Ehren Kruger, Joseph Kosinski
Actor(s): Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Javier Bardem

Written by Tom Augustine

Midway through F1: The Movie Brad Pitt, playing rebellious Formula 1 driver Sonny Hayes, stands on the balcony of a penthouse Vegas apartment looking out over the glittering skyline and delivers a monologue. What he says isn’t particularly important. I doubt I could recall any of the exact lines he says to his romantic interest, technical whiz Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), because little of the cinematic juice of the moment lies in the words of Ehren Kruger’s uninspiring script. What’s so arresting about the scene is simply watching Brad Pitt, who remains a confoundingly magnetic, mystifying presence decades into his screen career, in spite of all that has been revealed about him in recent years (which he seems monumentally invested in ignoring, and getting you to ignore). In the years since his Oscar for his remarkable performance in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, Pitt has headlined plenty of movies, from the good (Ad Astra) to the bad (Babylon, Wolfs, Bullet Train), but as he has remained on our screens, the now sixty-one actor has become less and less knowable. That air of unflappable cool, an unflagging detachedness from the hustle and bustle of Hollywood swirling around him, is the key to that magnetism, even as its inauthenticity seems more and more pronounced as the years wear on. It’s what makes him so damn watchable, it draws us in inexorably, waiting to see if we’ll get a glimpse behind the mask. When that mask does slip, and we see what Pitt can really do, it’s the stuff of Old Hollywood movie stars — more than his contemporary Tom Cruise, Pitt has managed to continue to walk the line of megastar unknowability and genuine demonstration of acting ability, vaulting him to incredibly rarefied space in the modern movie firmament. Like Cruise, Pitt’s performances rely not on rehashing the types of characters he’s played in the past so much as his ability to play to his audience’s awareness of the characters he’s played, whether that’s Tyler Durden, Aldo Raine, Jesse James, Mr Smith or Achilles. We watch Brad Pitt because of what it means to have a Brad Pitt at all, up on the big screen. 

As with the recent films of Tom Cruise, whose shadow looms over F1: The Movie, this latest film from Top Gun Maverick director Joseph Kosinski arrives with no small amount of significance to Hollywood blockbuster purists — like Maverick and the Mission: Impossible films, F1 is dedicated to carrying the banner for (semi-) grown-up drama playing to massive crowds, demonstrating the muscular properties of good screencraft at the highest budgetary levels imaginable. A noble mission, no doubt, one that insists that the things people went to the movies for over the course of a century hold true to this day — big stars, real spectacle, something to be shared in a communal space. Like Maverick, a meta-narrative thrums beneath the track of F1 — a dim awareness of its megawatt star’s ageing out of being able to do films like this (never more true than this year’s The Final Reckoning) and an awareness that we don’t have a whole lot of stars to fill the void they might leave. There are promising glimmers in Michael B Jordan and Austin Butler, certainly, but their stardom feels less tied to the cultivation of a persona than the Pitts and Cruises of this world. While we’re here, though, the feeling is wonderful — when F1 snaps into place, usually when it is zooming around a racing track, it is pure exhilaration. There’s something innately satisfying about watching a film as widescreen as this one without the presence of a single superhero, spaceship or aircraft carrier in sight. To that end, F1: The Movie, much like the cars at its centre, is meticulously designed to deliver exactly what you expect it to do. Much as a F1 rocket car would be out of place on anything but a race-track, it’s unreasonable to expect a film like this to deliver much in the way of nuance. It sets a hard ceiling on F1’s ability to transcend — but in the watching, one cares little for such things. The secret is right there in the title: formula.

Built from parts so classic they might as well be vintage, Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski chases the high with this thumping, muscular racing flick that doubles as a referendum on the star power of Brad Pitt. It’s a slick, expansive machine that almost does enough to distract from the project’s underlying moneymaking incentives, but never completely manages to conceal them.

Apex is the name of the racing company that seeks to hire Sonny Hayes, who has been adrift, casually winning races in any capacity he can since a terrible accident foiled his attempt to become the best in the world in his youth. He is sought out by Ruben (Javier Bardem, who continues his winning streak of standout turns in supporting roles in the biggest blockbusters imaginable), one-time teammate and owner of Apex, who has found himself deep in the financial hole after a number of humiliating losses. Apex’ other driver is Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a young emerging star in the field, alternatively puffed-up on his self-importance and cripplingly aware of his team’s flagging fortunes resting on his shoulders. Ruben entices Hayes to return to F1 with the promise of one last shot at ultimate F1 glory — ‘The only place you can say if you win, you are the best in the world’ he intones, reverently — prompting Hayes to almost single-handedly reorient Apex’ chances at glory with his appropriately maverick, Moneyball-esque strategies at manipulating the race to their advantage. The hero worship starts early and never really flags — we are never truly in doubt of Hayes’ total correctness in every strategy, even when a sudden, shocking tragedy strikes. There is fun to be had, though, in Hayes’ interplay with his doubters, namely Idris’ hotshot upstart and Condon’s cautious, capable head engineer. Idris, clearly positioned as the ‘new generation’ a la the surrounding Top Guns in Maverick (see the ascendant careers of Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman), isn’t necessarily radiating star power, but his trading barbs with Pitt is plenty enjoyable, particularly as the inevitable shift into wide-eyed respect begins to take place. Condon, so good in The Banshees of Inisherin, deserves better than what she’s given here, but nevertheless injects her love-interest role with enough definition to stand out, and demonstrates an easy chemistry with Pitt that leads to some of the film’s more enduring displays of emotion. 

The other star of F1: The Movie is of course, F1, the film a monument to the importance, grandiosity and pure excitement of the racing competition. That director Kosinski — a high-profile journeyman who, like his contemporary Christopher MacQuarrie, has made a career of directing clean, satisfying action that knows to get out of the way of its star — manages to generate something that distracts us from the company’s bottom-line incentives is a success unto itself. In the modern blockbuster sphere, F1 is hardly the first project to double as a gigantic advertisement for a company’s product — Disney made a whole empire out of it, Barbie took it to the Oscars — so an acknowledgement of the slightly cynical nature of the enterprise is a given. Occasionally, though, such cynicism becomes too glaring to ignore, as in Hayes’ continual insistence that the desire to race is ‘not about the money’, as much of a catchphrase as this character has; the very character of Bardem’s Ruben, meanwhile, is a megarich company man who, like Will Ferrell’s suit in Barbie, is both spared any real consequence and welcomed into the fold of the ‘good guys’ without question, a parallel that’s fairly unflattering when considering the character’s real world corollaries. Brands are everywhere in F1: not just the company’s own sleek logo, but those of sponsors from Heineken to Tommy Hilfiger, Ford, BMW and Mercedes. Everyone gets in on the fun, and occasionally in F1: The Movie, the product placement becomes so egregious as to undercut the pure cinematic spectacle that the film desperately needs to cultivate to survive. As with its star, F1 is hoping that there’ll be enough bombast and pizzazz to sweep any concerns under the rug — and frequently, the cacophonous racing sequences achieve just that — but nothing lasts forever, and the mask sometimes slips. 

F1: The Movie is in cinemas now.