You can’t fault the logic behind F1 (or, to be precise, F1® the Movie, for marketing and algorithmic purposes). If strapping an A-lister into a fighter jet worked like a dream for 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, then surely strapping an A-lister into a Formula One racer would produce similar, if not identical, results.
Yet while director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda can certainly shoot cars as well as they can planes – it’s all plumes of smoke from the tyres and the bone-rattling rumble of starting engines – F1 represents the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all of Maverick’s giddy pleasures.
For a film both produced by and starring (in a brief but pivotal role) Lewis Hamilton, and otherwise happily populated by a real who’s who of the current F1 scene, Ehren Kruger’s script sidelines much of the real skill involved here, all those split-second decisions of when to pit and when to overtake. Instead, we’re called on to root for Brad Pitt’s washed-up veteran Sonny Hayes, an obnoxiously skewed take on Tom Cruise’s Maverick who treats the track like his own personal Ben-Hur chariot race.
He’s been tempted back by former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) as a last-ditch attempt to save his failing APXGP team from being forced into a sale. They’re stuck in dead-last place, and their rookie pick Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris) is clearly in need of a tough-love mentor. They butt heads, at first. You can guess where that leads. The team’s technical director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), sees right through Sonny’s “lone wolf” schtick. You can guess where that leads, too.
Sonny, like Maverick, is a rule-breaker, yet the prevailing theme here seems to be less boyish cocksureness, more outright deviousness and what could essentially be described as “weaponised incompetence”. In short, he’s hard to root for because he’s not so much pushing the limits as simply refusing to play fair. And the fact it takes until the film’s final grand prix, after we’ve spent more than two hours bouncing from the UK to Italy to Japan etc etc, to actually let the audience soak into some honest-to-god, skilled racing has a real way of taking the sheen off all these flexes about actors in the driver’s seat.
Idris’s character, and performance, may be the more grounded of the pair, but F1 seems too infatuated with Sonny’s near-mythical bravado (note how Hans Zimmer’s score flares up like he’s a comic book hero making his grand entrance every time he turns up to the track), to give him close to the proper attention.
And there’s a more cynical read, here, in how Sonny’s personality quirks all feel like callbacks to famous, past Pitt turns – he lives in a trailer like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s Cliff Booth and has an affection for Vegas like Ocean’s Eleven’s Rusty Ryan. Sonny is a character whose rage and recklessness are ultimately celebrated by the film as not only redeemable but, in certain situations, admirable, which feels uncomfortably close to a kind of image control in the wake of the allegations made by Pitt’s former partner, Angelina Jolie, as part of their protracted legal separation battles.
Granted, it’s unlikely the average audience member will be all that invested in granular discussions about tyre softness and aerodynamics, but the beauty of good writing and good direction is that we should feel so drawn into these niche, specific worlds that we walk out the other side feeling like we could hop into a car and race at Silverstone the very next day. That’s not what F1 achieves – instead, it takes the easier, more soulless route.
Dir: Joseph Kosinski. Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Javier Bardem. Cert 12A, 156 minutes.
‘F1’ is in cinemas from 25 June
