'F1: The Movie' Plays More Like 'F1: The Advertisement'
What if 'Top Gun: Maverick' but it's a 156-minute commercial?
I used to watch the Netflix docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive. It’s a well-made show covering various storylines that permeate a season of Formula 1 racing, but I tapped out after a few seasons because the top of the field usually stays the same and there are only so many stories you can get out of the sport before they start to feel redundant without only the names and teams changing within the larger narrative. But it’s a big, expensive business, and like any major brand these days, there comes the inevitable question, “Where’s my movie?” On paper, it would seem like F1 would at least lend itself to a cool racing drama, but in practice, we get what feels like a barrage of corporate notes with the semblance of a story and characters buried somewhere beneath the larger purpose of selling audience members on how F1 works. F1: The Movie1 is like debuting a pristine, logo-coated racer only to have it cross the finish line at the back of the pack.
Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) had a shot at being one of the great F1 racers, but a horrifying accident early in his career pushed him out of the sport. Determined to keep driving, Hayes now races wherever he can, regardless of the particular sport. When his old teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem), now the owner of the fictional F1 team Apex Grand Prix (APX), strolls in and offers him a seat as a way of mentoring inexperienced rookie driver Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), Sonny reluctantly takes the job. The team must win at least one race in the last nine games of the season, or else the board will sell the team and Ruben will lose everything. As Sonny and Joshua butt heads, Sonny starts to fall for the team’s technical director, Kate (Kerry Condon), while also attempting to shake up Formula One to get the team a win.
Perhaps the strangest element of F1 is how it works to establish stakes for the supporting characters, but not for Sonny. Ruben could lose his team, Joshua could lose his seat, and Kate, along with the rest of the crew, could lose their jobs, but Sonny will keep driving. His desire to race is motivation, but there’s little pinned on what happens for him emotionally or narratively should he fail. Similar to Top Gun: Maverick (the previous film for director Joseph Kosinski and writer Ehren Kruger), we’re meant to know that “the old man’s still got it!” But at least Maverick had the underpinnings of its lead character’s guilt and acknowledgement of how much he sacrificed to say in a cockpit. While it is odd to see Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, two of the most successful movie stars of all time, play frustrated guys in late middle age, at least in the case of Maverick, the stakes are clear: do this job or never fly again.
For Sonny, those stakes don’t exist, and the result is that Pitt coasts on his character being cool, which is starting to wear thin at this point. I’m all for finding a way to do more with less in a performance, and Pitt certainly aced that in 2019 with Ad Astra and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, but there’s no fire in the belly here. Maybe Pitt feels like a guy in his 60s doesn’t need the intensity of his earlier characters, but Sonny is so languid that his old-pro mentality tends to play as emotionally vacant. “I’m here because I don’t know what else I’d do” is not a compelling motivation for a character or an actor. F1 feels like taking his Billy Beane character from Moneyball, and instead of trying to figure out the game from a new perspective as a frustrated general manager, he goes back to playing baseball.
No one else in the film fares much better, resting on the thinnest of premises to add another dimension to their characters. But the clunky script never arrives at anything gradually, instead resting the weight of character and plot developments into clumsy scenes where someone makes a big discovery about another character, only to have the revelation land with a thud. It’s the story equivalent of airdropping a racer over the finish line and calling it a win rather than running the race.
Kosinski tries his best to overpower these shortcomings through sheer technical bravado, and he almost succeeds. The most interesting thing about F1 is how it was made, and rather than being even moderately invested in what the characters were going through, I spent large chunks of the film wondering how Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda achieved their stunning shots. F1 doesn’t succeed at putting you in the mind of a racer, but it does put you in the car, and in terms of capturing the speed and exhilaration of going hundreds of kilometers an hour, the film is a breathless ride even if we’re not exactly sure why these races matter.
If the race scenes had clear stakes, then Kosinski would have the freedom to tell his story visually, allowing us to shut out the noise and focus on what’s happening. But because F1 wants to introduce the sport to neophytes, it piles on exposition and explainers into the announcing. It would be like watching a baseball movie where the announcers would say things like, “And he’s just hit the ball and arrived safely on first base! There are three more bases he’ll need to cover if he wants to make it ‘home,’ and then his team will score a much-needed run on their way to a possible victory!” I accept that the intricacies of F1 are more complicated than baseball, but if you’re constantly having to explain what’s happening on screen, you messed up somewhere. F1 cannot function as both a celebration of the sport and an introduction for beginners. It has to pick a lane.
But that “F1 for everyone!” mentality permeates the entire picture. In addition to the governing body of F1, there’s the input of real teams. Major F1 figures like Mercedes Team Principal and CEO Toto Wolff and seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton are credited as producers on the movie. Real figures like racer Max Verstappen and former Haas Team Principal Guenther Steiner dot the landscape, but instead of adding to the realism, these touches highlight the phoniness of the central story. Every move by Sonny to “shake things up” only raises questions of why other racers don’t make the same moves. The implication seems to be that everyone else is racing “the right way,” and Sonny is a rogue element, but if that’s the case, then why are we rooting for him? F1 wants to have it both ways, where we cheer for Sonny’s combative attitude, but also celebrate a sport where everyone else plays by the rules.
As much as F1 wants to bring you inside the sport, it only wants to show you the most polished version possible. We’re meant to marvel at how technicians work to get an extra tenth-of-a-second on the vehicle or the frictious relationship between F1 teammates. “Look at our fancy facilities! Admire our big simulators!” the film screams, and I suppose that’s all kind of neat, but it should serve as window-dressing for the movie, not its main event. F1 feels loaded up with far too many ideas and compromises, and while those involved with the sport may be happy with their latest branding exercise, everyone else is left to shift uncomfortably as the film sputters along.
The studio keeps insisting that we refer to the film as “F1: The Movie,” presumably not to confuse it with F1: The Academy or F1: The Breakfast Cereal, but from here out, I’m just going to call it “F1.”