Joseph Kosinski is not my favorite director. Nevertheless F1: The Movie shows off many of the things that he does exceptionally well. His sound design and cameras mounted on the vehicles made you feel the speed and torque of the fighter planes in motion in Top Gun: Maverick, and those elements give the same sense of immediacy here as open-wheel race cars trade paint at speeds in excess of 200 mph. After a practice run on a wreck, the camera stops on the right front wheel to show the beating it has taken from spinning on gravel.
Compare the film version of Gran Turismo from two years ago, which was about the same sport. That movie already felt weightless, and this one makes it seem more so just by capturing the visceral thrill of going fast. You will want to see this in a theater with good speakers, because experiencing the roar of the engines (to the point that you may emerge from this film exhausted from all the sound energy hitting your body) is a big part of what makes you feel like you’re there on race day, climbing into the cockpit with the drivers.
Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a formerly promising F1 racer who suffered a catastrophic wreck in the early 1990s and has spent the last 30 years living out of his van and earning money by knocking around IndyCar and NASCAR. After helping win the 24 Hours of Daytona, he’s washing his clothes in a Laundromat in Florida when his former racing teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem) pulls up to the place in his Porsche and offers Sonny a seat on his Formula One racing team.
The unthinkable break doesn’t come from nowhere — Ruben’s team is a laughingstock that’s $350 million in the hole and on the verge of shuttering, his board of directors is loudly whispering about pushing him out, and his best driver Joshua (Damson Idris) is a raw English rookie who needs a good dose of mentoring. With everybody playing for their jobs, forget winning. The team would happily take Top-10 finishes in some of the nine races left in the season.
This movie does spend some time cheerleading for the sport it depicts, but Ehren Kruger’s script prefers to dive deep into race strategy. Sonny concludes that his car won’t beat Ferrari, McLaren, or Red Bull on the straightaways, so he asks the team’s Lockheed engineer-turned-technical director (Kerry Condon) to place additional armoring on the car to make it more competitive on the turns. In his second race, Sonny slows the pace to a crawl by baiting other drivers into repeatedly damaging his car, contributing to Joshua’s ninth-place finish. He then goes into the next race knowing his competitors will expect a repeat performance, so he surprises them by going all out to start. Non-racing fans can gain an understanding of people’s different roles on the team, and we see the pit crew’s mistakes contributing to the drivers’ struggles. Sonny coaches the crew by telling them, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” a koan that has applications well beyond auto racing.
The movie was shot in actual racing venues from Monza to Mexico City, which helps it capture the glamour of the racing circuit, and a slew of real-life Formula One racers portray themselves. Finding himself in last place by a full lap, Sonny obstructs race leader Max Verstappen to give Joshua a chance to overtake him, while Lewis Hamilton not only plays himself but also serves as a producer on the film. These things are great to have, but they don’t make a good movie by themselves. (Case in point: Herbie: Fully Loaded.)
I must say that neither Sonny’s romantic subplot with that technical director nor his mentoring of Joshua are quite able to pull their weight, and this high-powered cast doesn’t exactly have many chances to show new facets of their talent. The character material is where movies like Rush and Ford v. Ferrari have F1 beat. Then again, neither of those films quite matches this one in conveying the excitement that draws fans all over the world to this sport and drivers to this occasionally deadly pursuit of checkered flags and trophies. Maybe that isn’t everything, but it’s a lot.
F1: The Movie
Starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, and Javier Bardem. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Written by Ehren Kruger. Rated PG-13.
