If you like cars that go “Vroom, vroom!” and you like that Brad Pitt fella, that might be enough for you to like F1: The Movie, the latest summer tentpole rattling speakers at local theaters.
I love Brad Pitt. I love him very, very much. Cars that go “Vroom, vroom!”? Eh, not so much. Most of the Fast and Furious movies can bite me; Tom Cruise’s 1990 crap-fest Days of Thunder sucks ass; and even the Cars movies from Pixar delivered diminishing returns. OK, I really liked Talledega Nights, but I’m not sure that counts as a real car-racing movie. It kind of mocked the industry. (Trivia note: Jerry Bruckheimer produced both F1 and Cruise’s Days of Thunder.)
This big-balled movie starring Pitt as Sonny Hayes, an aging racer looking to put his legacy mark on Formula 1, feels like many a movie that came before it. Hayes is hired by Ruben (Javier Bardem), a money man who believes Sonny still has what it takes to win. He’s just got that special something that will make him drive faster than anybody despite his bad attitude, ya know what I mean?
Of course, because this film is following a done-to-death plot path, Sonny is coming in as the team’s second driver, and must mentor Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the younger, up-and-coming driver who also has some attitude problems.
This leads to a lot of moments in which the older guy is calling out the younger guy for being a pretentious dick, and the younger guy is proclaiming the older guy to be an asshole. You get not just one career-threatening track accident, but many. And Sonny will, of course, get it on with Kate (Kerry Condon), the racing team’s top scientist who “never sleeps with team members,” but she will this time, because he’s Brad fucking Pitt.
Director Joseph Kosinski, who made the much-better Top Gun: Maverick, tries to bring the feeling of being strapped into a road rocket and blasting around a racetrack to the big screen. The problem: From the inside of these cars, with the narrow scope of vision, the tracks all look the same, whether in Las Vegas or Abu Dhabi. After a couple of laps around the tracks, and multiple quick-tire-change pit stops, this thing gets rather monotonous. And it clocks in at just more than seven hours! (Actually, it’s only two hours and 35 minutes, but that’s still too damned long for a cliché-ridden racing movie.)
There are moments, including the ending, when the film looks like it might be going somewhere unexpected—but then it bails out in favor of being light and fluffy instead of down and dirty. As for the ending and how the characters behave in it … nope, not buying it.
Pitt is fine here, even if he is basically doing a variation of his Oscar-winning role as a washed-up stunt guy in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. There are scenes in which he has to blurt out trite dialogue, and you can see a glimmer of, “I know it’s bad, but I’m getting paid A LOT for this, so I’m going to dish this verbal slop out with measurable conviction,” behind his eyes. It looks like Pitt is actually going to step into that Cliff Booth role again (this time for David Fincher, directing a script by Quentin Tarantino), so he will be saying funnier, wittier, more original things onscreen in the near future.
If they had clipped about 45 minutes off of F1: The Movie and gotten somebody to tune up the script with a refreshing angle or two, this could’ve been a fun, throwback kind of movie. Instead, it feels like worn tires on a familiar track, going round, and round, and round, and round, and round …
