It's appropriate that race cars are covered in corporate logos, because recent car-racing movies seem to exist primarily as vehicles for product placement. That was the case with 2023's Gran Turismo, and it's even more blatant in F1, a movie named after the multibillion-dollar racing promotion it depicts. F1 is a Formula One commercial first, and a narrative film somewhere in distant second, with every story beat and character designed to showcase the supposed grandeur of Formula One racing — and all of those corporate logos.
It's certainly possible to make an entertaining and even artistically ambitious movie out of a brand name, as the creators behind films like Barbie and The Lego Movie have proved. But director and co-writer Joseph Kosinski seems far too awed by Formula One to interrogate it in any meaningful way. Kosinski translated that awe into more engaging drama with 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, and F1 is clearly meant to evoke some of the same excitement and wonder. Kosinski even casts one of the only actors who could be considered Tom Cruise's peer in his leading role.
Brad Pitt plays the Maverick-like Sonny Hayes, a once-promising hotshot Formula One driver who never lived up to his potential. Following a nasty crash early in his career, he's spent the last 30 years bumming around from one racing circuit to another, never staying put long enough to establish himself in any particular league or team. He drives for the pure love of it, which is essentially his only character trait.
That's one more character trait than is afforded to Sonny's old friend and former rival Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who tracks down Sonny in a laundromat and makes him an offer to return to Formula One as a driver for Ruben's perpetually losing Apex Grand Prix team. Ruben is the least sympathetic kind of figure — a rich guy in danger of being slightly less rich — and the screenplay by Ehren Kruger fails to capture the requisite sports underdog energy. If Apex can't win one of the races left in the current season, Ruben will be forced to sell the team, and he wants Sonny to join forces with Apex's rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
So the seasoned veteran clashes with the hotheaded newcomer, the team keeps losing until it starts almost winning, sudden injuries threaten to take out key players, and Pitt still looks good. There's nothing about F1 that isn't predictable, including the rote romance between Sonny and Apex's outspoken technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon).
Pitt is as charming as ever, making Sonny into a combination between his savvy Moneyball sports strategist Billy Beane and his Ocean's franchise heist mastermind Rusty Ryan. Sonny is a great driver, but his main contribution to Apex is a series of questionably legal plays that throw off other drivers and give Apex a chance to make up lost ground.
It's all a bit too "ain't no rule that says a dog can't play basketball," and it eventually becomes just as repetitive as the races themselves, which Kosinski filmed at real-life Formula One events around the world. As he did in Maverick, Kosinski gives the action a visceral realism by placing the camera in actual cars racing on actual tracks, but the Formula One races aren't nearly as exciting as the dogfights in Maverick. There are only so many ways to show the same cars going round and round, and onscreen title cards that say things like "Lap 66" don't do much to dispel the monotony.
Maybe die-hard Formula One fans will find the movie more compelling, but despite reams of exposition, the parameters of the competition remain opaque for outsiders. Even worse, there isn't a single other competitor with any onscreen presence, so there's no one to root for Apex to defeat in the races. Sonny would be perfectly happy to go back to small-time racing, making Ruben's wallet the only thing truly at stake.
That's an inadvertent reflection of the values of both Formula One and F1, which is a cynical advertisement masquerading as a feature film. Pitt and Idris go through the motions of the conflict between Sonny and Joshua, who will obviously learn to respect and support each other by the time the final big race comes around. Pitt and Condon do the same with the perfunctory love story, although they have slightly better chemistry. Bardem fades into the background after Ruben's initial recruitment of Sonny, and Tobias Menzies looks lost as a vaguely scheming member of Apex's board of directors.
The meager story drags out for 156 minutes, so that the movie can showcase as many of Formula One's flashy races as possible, in places like Dubai and Las Vegas. F1 is equally flashy, and it's tempting to get distracted by the vrooming cars and Hans Zimmer's booming score. Take a moment to slow down, though, and it's easy to see that there's nothing under the hood.
F1
Rated PG-13
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon
