At The Movies: F1 The Movie races past expectations
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(From left) Damson Idris and Brad Pitt in F1 The Movie.
PHOTO: WBEI
Follow topic:
- Brad Pitt's Sonny Hayes joins a struggling F1 team to mentor a young driver, Joshua Pearce, facing team resentment.
- The film humanises F1, showing drivers' families and the sport's commercial aspects, avoiding the "bro attitude".
- Visceral racing scenes, achieved without CGI, immerse viewers, though the plot includes unnecessary backstories and jargon.
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F1 The Movie (PG13)
155 minutes, opens on June 26
★★★★☆
The story: Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a nomadic American driver-for-hire, is brought into a struggling Formula One (F1) team because team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) needs his experience to temper the raw talent of young driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). The American’s straight-shooting ways annoy members of the mainly European team, including Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the technical director. His teammate Joshua resents being saddled with a driver past his prime. He is proven right when their early races together are disasters.
There is a huge ask behind this movie, and that is that moviegoers ought to care enough about the sport of F1 racing to pay money to see it.
Director Joseph Kosinski knows all about making insular, machismo-driven worlds more open and inviting. He helmed the military drama Top Gun: Maverick (2022), the Tom Cruise action movie that made naval aviators human beings first, aeroplane jockeys second.
He accomplishes the same feat in this movie. The effort to banish even the slightest hint of “bro attitude” in this very masculine sport is made clear from the early scenes.
That humanising comes without making it all feel like a token attempt at public relations. Wives and children are shown, with Joshua’s formidable mother, Bernadette (Sarah Niles), justifying an all-too-brief amount of screen time with a memorable performance.
There is one exception. While every supporting character gets a family or relationship anchoring him or her in a wider human world, Pitt’s Sonny fits the trope of a Zen hero. He is the wandering monk who has disavowed home, family and friendship for the transcendent joy of infusing his soul into the machine – of “flying”, as he calls it.
Kosinski’s excellent direction sells this bit of pure hokum, while Pitt mostly just squints, at least in the early scenes.
His character opens up more later in the film, when the story gets into an unnecessary backstory about a stalled F1 career in the 1990s that motivates him in the present day. The Zen stuff was enough, and screen time for Sonny’s backstory should have been given to the mentor-protege dynamic between Sonny and Joshua.
Non-fans like this reviewer will be baffled when the film gets technical. Be warned – the story gets into the weeds about starting formations, tyre selection, pit-stop timings and aerodynamic fittings. Call it F1 fan service.
On the other hand, more mundane, off-track details serve to make the story richer, such as when drivers are shown being forced to make nice, through gritted teeth, with journalists, owners and sponsors. In one throwaway but telling scene, Sonny dons a cap with a corporate logo on it for a five-second walk with cameras present, then tosses it immediately after.
But this expensive piece of marketing for F1 racing – and the dozens of corporations with logos on-screen – would fail if it did not work as an action movie.
The racing scenes are visceral and thrilling, made more immersive because they were done without visible digital effects, with even the crashes looking painfully realistic. The pulse-pounding, ground-level photography drives home the idea that drivers possess superhuman reflexes – not just to win, but also to survive.
Hot take: This thrilling action film humanises the machismo-driven world of F1 racing, though it sometimes gets bogged down in jargon and tired Zen-hero tropes.
