Brad Pitt stars as an aging driver who gives Formula One racing one more go.
Spectacular racing footage suffuses the entirety of Joseph Kosinski’s F1: The Movie, which demands to be experienced on the largest screen in the loudest theater available.
That being said, everything else about the movie pales by comparison. But boy, that racing!
Brad Pitt gives a classic movie star performance as Sonny Hayes, an aging driver who competed in Formula One Racing three decades in the past before a tragic accident during his rookie season prompted him to turn to other means of gambling with his life.
After Sonny wins the 24 Hours of Le Mans, old friendly rival Ruben (Javier Bardem) lures him into joining his F1 racing team as a mentor for hot-shot rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), mostly as a favor in order to help Ruben out of a big hole: as team owner, Ruben is $250 million in debt and under high pressure to lose his team, thanks to investors like the slimy Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), a key member of the company’s board of directors.
Veteran scribe Ehren Kruger, an old hand at working on summer blockbusters, devised the screenplay, based on an original story by himself and director Kosinski. The script, which features “additional literary material” by four other writers, feels like an afterthought, solely a means to link together all the racing footage as the new team follows the Formula One circuit during an entire season.
And there’s nothing inherently wrong with doing that, especially since the racing footage is inherently exciting to watch, especially in the manner that Kosinski shoots it. Here, the constant cutting and the unintelligible dialogue feels part and parcel of the experience, along with the screeching of tires and the bashing of race cars as they scream through turns and consistently smash into each other and/or walls and other obstacles.
Where the film turns left instead of right, it’s in the surprising posture of putting Sonny Hayes into the position of being a bad-boy whose sole responsibility is to create trouble on the track so that the kid JP, as Sonny consistently calls the younger driver to his irritation, has any kind of hope of winning the race. Their racing team is not up to snuff with the other teams on the circuit — mostly played by real-life F1 drivers — and so Sonny resorts to ‘dirty tricks’ and maneuvers that skirt racing regulations, all to give JP a chance.
This aspect of racing has not been explored on the big screen to any great extent, to my knowledge, and so it feels fresh and distinctive. I’m not sure making the highly-paid protagonist of the film a cheap and dirty trickster is really the way to go, as far as authentic is concerned, but it helps to maintain a modicum of interest during the repetitive dramatic sequences, which consistently hit the same beats over and over again. On the plus side, Brad Pitt does everything you’d expect a movie star to do in a role that was custom built for his lazy charm and thousand-yard stares.
However it was concocted, the script relies on an entirely predictable and, yes, formulaic method to tell its story that becomes tiresome to watch in its first half hour, which, considering its 155-minute runtime, makes the movie a chore. But boy, that racing!
The film opens Friday, June 27, only in movie theaters. See it on the biggest one you can. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.
Dallas Film Now. 