F1: THE MOVIE Review: Brad Pitt's Star Vehicle Revs Up Hyperkinetic, Hyper-Stylized Action

Fundamentally, a glossy, big-budget, star-driven vehicle like Joseph Kosinski’s (Top Gun: Maverick, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy) latest effort, F1: The Movie (hereinafter “F1”), a Formula One racing drama, falls broadly into an updated, contemporary version of film historian Tom Gunning's “cinema of attractions,” an umbrella term used to describe the spectacle first, story second. sensation over meaning, and technique over theme approach of late 19th-century, early-20th-century filmmakers. Later, filmmakers flipped the script, giving precedence to story over spectacle. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the dominance of blockbuster cinema at the box office reconfigured filmmaker and audience preferences alike.

 

As a filmmaker, Kosinski has specialized in bringing singularly imagined, carefully curated worlds (digital/virtual, post-apocalyptic, the U.S. military-industrial complex) to theater screens. The stories, however, have often been, if not exactly rote, then rote-adjacent, relying on over-familiar tropes, conventions, and cliches to convey the bare minimum needed to keep audiences engaged between next-level set pieces. It's an approach reflected in F1's the expertly choreographed, anxiety-inducing Formula One races involving Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a down-and-out, middle-aged, once popular F1 driver, and his rookie teammate and reluctant protege, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).

 

Hayes joins the F1 circuit halfway through a disastrous season, a last, desperate attempt by Hayes’s longtime friend, ex-Grand Prix partner, and current Apex Grand Prix (APXGP) owner, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem). If the season doesn’t turn around and the team notch some wins or top finishes, Cervantes faces an ownership challenge and a potential sale led by a board member, Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), unhappy with Cervantes's decision-making.

 

Cervantes hopes Hayes's mentorship will help Pearce make the proverbial leap from promising rookie to a spot on the winner's podium. It's a tall, likely impossible order, given Pearce’s outsized ego and refusal to accept anyone's advice or guidance, with the exception of his overprotective mother, Bernadette (Sarah Niles).

 

To Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger’s (Top Gun: Maverick, the Transformers series, The Ring remake) modest credit, F1 doesn’t turn Bernadette into a hissable villain, superficially well-intentioned, but driven by a selfish, egotistical agenda of her own. Instead, Bernadette simply wants what’s best for her only son, explicitly recognizing that failure as a rookie driver could mean the end of Pearce’s Formula One racing career before it’s had a chance to properly begin. Unsurprisingly, however, she doesn’t immediately warm to Hayes’s presence on the track, seeing him initially as an unnecessary distraction rather than a potential mentor for Pearce. 

 

Structured around the remaining grand prix races in locales as excitingly exotic as France, Hungary, and Las Vegas, F1 uses the downtime between races for a surface-deep plunge into Hayes’ backstory and character, his clashes with Cervantes, and a tepid, obligatory romance with Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the team’s technical director. Kate focuses on modifications and upgrades that will shave a tenth of a second here and a tenth of a second there, anything to give the team’s drivers a slight edge against the competition. As Hayes pushes Kate to think bigger and make riskier mods, their meet-ups turn into backstory-swapping and eventually, intimacy. 

 

As expected given Kosinski’s track record as a generationally gifted visual stylist, the racing sequences employ every possible camera angle inside and outside the cars, over one shoulder or another, following the cars or dancing inches away from the drivers’s faces. Kosinski interweaves larger, widescreen shots of the cars in  action, aggressively jostling for position, turning corners as sharply as humanly and technically possible, all while the specter of losing control and crashing hovers over the drivers. Death can come at almost any time, but so can serious, career-ending injury. 

 

And as the races come and go, losses mount, increasing the in-film professional and personal stakes for Hayes, Pearce, and Cervantes. Never a team player, Hayes has to learn how to play with others. Pearce needs to learn to take driving and put it into practice on the racetrack. It's nothing, of course, we haven’t seen or heard countless times before in sports dramas following an oft-used, oft-overused template like F1 does here, leaving any and all surprises strictly for whatever minor variations on set themes Kosinski and his team can deliver onscreen. 

 

Unsurprisingly, the pleasures here are strictly visual and aural, though the 61-year-old Pitt, arguably one of the last old-school movie stars, remains a fascinating, charismatic presence onscreen. Idris brings the right level of cockiness and self-regard to Hayes’s immature, inexperienced counterpart without slipping into caricature or unlikability.

 

Working from a schematic, underdeveloped script, the supporting cast still manage to acquit themselves relatively well, hitting their marks as required, and believably delivering their often banal dialogue. Sometimes that’s all you can — or should — ask from your cast.