Three decades after suffering a career-altering injury, a 50-something driver is recruited to lead a racing team in F1 (also titled F1: The Movie in some promotional material), opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This slick, high-powered product from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski can often feel like a feature-length advertisement for Formula One, and a disarmingly straightforward story could have used some more intrigue to justify the 2.5-hour runtime—but the truly dazzling production is a real wow in technical terms.
F1 stars an effortlessly charismatic Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, former Formula One driver who suffered a devastating crash in the 1990s that forced him into retirement from the premiere motorsport. Still, he’s made a living over the decades as a kind of racecar drifter, showing up at various events to dominate the competition and collect a paycheck. As the film opens, he’s driving at 24 Hours of Daytona for Chip Hart (Shea Whigham), and makes up considerable time to put his team in first during his slot.
We know nothing about Hayes at this point, but witness the spectacle of this race with jaw-dropping amazement: cinematographer Claudio Miranda’s eye-popping camerawork swirls around the neon-lit racetrack in a towering 1.90:1 IMAX scope, Hans Zimmer’s electrifying score gets the blood pumping, and rat-a-tat editing keeps us glued to the screen as fireworks fill the sky against the Florida backdrop.
This is a 24-hour race that our protagonist only drives a sliver of, but Kosinski does everything he can to keep us engaged throughout; like the flying scenes in Top Gun: Maverick, and backed by much of the same creative team, the racing here is slick stuff presented at the highest level possible. Only the Wachowskis, in Speed Racer, delivered driving scenes more stylized—but unlike that film, F1 is rigidly set in the realm of realism. Sometimes, to its own detriment.
F1 will end with another race—this time at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix—and the movie operates at the same level as filmmaking craft as before: we’re invested in the race for the razzle-dazzle, if nothing else. That’s good, because there’s little else in this movie to draw our interest: in the two-plus hours between the two races that bookend the film, there are many other exciting races, and nothing else to invest in on an emotional level.
But there is some terrific camaraderie between Pitt and Javier Bardem, who plays Ruben Cervantes, Hayes’ onetime Formula One rival and current owner of the Apex Grand Prix F1 team. Apex hasn’t placed in a Grand Prix all season, and Cervantes is about to be voted off his own team by his advisory board. Seeking out a hail Mary, he coaxes Hayes to return to Formula One after three decades, and maybe show Apex’s hotshot young rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) a thing or two about winning.
There’s all the elements of a traditional sports movie here: Hayes’ amazing comeback story, a rivalry with Pearce that breaks the team apart before driving it to success, an underdog win that will save Cervantes his position from scheming board member Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), headbutting between Hayes and Apex team principal Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), and even a taboo romance between Hayes and Apex technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon).
Strangely, Ehren Kruger‘s script seems to downplay all these elements, and the motivations and stakes in F1 are never explicit enough to allow us to take sides or understand what’s really being contested while the drivers are out racing. It’s a conscious choice, underscored by the final scene in the movie, which recalls John Huston’s Fat City more than the usual sports movie.
There have been a lot of true racing stories turned into exciting Hollywood films in recent years, using a lot of the same tropes: Rush, Ford v. Ferrari, Gran Turismo, even Michael Mann‘s Ferrari. And yet F1, this huge summer blockbuster, wants to dial back the clichés and deliver a more realistic racing movie. And against all odds, it works.
F1 does something none of those other racing films have done, and instead of just driving faster cars and making better turns and boxing out opponents, it really digs into Formula One strategy: choosing the best time to go in for a pit stop, intentionally causing a minor crash to deliver your teammate a well-timed red flag, and all the minuscule changes that can be made to shave tenths of a second off a lap time. The film pauses for lengthy explanations about why the Apex drivers can change their tires while the other racers can’t, as if we really understand. Or care.
But we do appreciate the attempt to educate us about Formula One racing, which should be no surprise given that one of the producers on this film is F1 legend Lewis Hamilton, and dozens of real-life drivers appear throughout the movie. In this regard, the movie most resembles another Brad Pitt sports movie: Moneyball, which taught us all about complex baseball statistics, and the value of drawing a walk, and how a guy with a spreadsheet can outthink a roomful of gut instincts.
Unlike that film, one of the very best of this century, F1 fails to deliver compelling or relatable characters that we can root for, regardless of the win-lose outcome. But it’s a more thoughtful movie than many will give it credit for, and the breathless racing scenes dial up the excitement factor in a way that the script does not. It may stall emotionally, but F1 still burns rubber where it counts—and makes for one hell of a pit stop this summer, especially in IMAX.
