Review: F1 – Race around the world
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
6/10
This is as typical of an F1 movie as you expect—an all-round advertisement for the sport and its various tracks across the world, though it doesn’t aim to do much more in its 156-minute run-time.
The story here is ridiculously simple. Sonny Mayes (Brad Pitt) is a retired F1 driver who is recruited by his old colleague Ruben (Javier Bardem) to compete again. He butts heads with his young teammate Noah (Damson Idris) and is flirty with the technical director Kate (Kerry Condon). Clearly, the story is kept to a minimum so as not to overcomplicate this advertisement for the sport.
There’s a pretty healthy mix of character and action, with what feels like an equal amount of time given to both. And yet, despite all that time both on the track and in the barracks, there appear to be no real stakes involved with winning F1, other than just for its own sake.
Director Joseph Kosinski certainly showed he can shoot action scenes in such an exciting manner with Top Gun: Maverick, but he seems far more limited with staging the action when it’s flat on the ground. There’s so little variety in shots and editing that these race scenes get pretty tiring after only the first few tracks.
But there are some intriguing race manoeuvres in the first few races. If you’ve never seen F1 before and you think it’s just a bunch of cars driving in circles over and over, the race scenes are thankfully not like that here. Interesting tactics are used on the tracks, mostly by Sonny to put himself further behind but put Noah ahead, even if these clever stunts may in reality be considered illegal within the sport.
There’s nothing really under the surface in terms of exploring why it is he races. The film actually does end on this exact question, left unanswered by Pitt’s vague face, as if to confirm the film’s own total uncertainty with itself and why it’s enamoured with this highly dangerous sport. As Ruben puts it, “Why can’t we just play tennis or golf instead?” But the film never opens itself up to truly muse on this question.
The first images in the film are of relaxing waves crashing, brutally intercut with high-speed race footage, suggesting how close these disparate feelings are for someone like Sonny. But throughout the film’s two-and-a-half-hour-plus run-time, F1: The Movie only lightly scratches at the issues haunting Sonny as he returns to the limelight—his age difference, his devastating crash in 1993, and his various marital problems are referenced, but there’s little said about what they mean to him as he re-enters this part of his life.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN