It felt like Joseph Kosinski successfully resurrected the career of the first victim of “cancel culture” with his box office smash hit Top Gun: Maverick. So it makes sense that a combination of Hollywood superstar on the outs, fast moving vehicles, and Director Kosinski should be a recipe for success. And while the technical achievements of F1: The Movie are as bombastic as a ballistic missile, the lack of whatever touchups were done by Christopher McQuarrie on the Top Gun: Maverick script are certainly felt as trope after trope are dumped into the stew that is Formula One’s major Hollywood swing.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a race car driver who is at the end of his rope, having retired from F1, the film opens on him winning the Daytona 500. You can tell he’s down on his luck because he used to race F1, and now he’s racing NASCAR. Already the point of the film is clear, the only racing that matters is Formula One. The picture is, by and large, a marketing maneuver by the sport that few Americans are invested in. Sonny manages to win the Daytona 500 and leaves early, driving the van he lives in out to California to race Baja, an off road event that’s popular in Mexico and Southern California. It’s not about the money for Sonny, it’s about being behind the wheel of whatever car he can get a seat in.

On his way out west he’s head hunted by a former F1 teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem) who is on the verge of losing the F1 crew that he owns now, if he doesn’t start scoring some wins. He convinces Sonny to fly to the UK to race alongside rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), behind the wheel of a car designed by the sport’s first ever female technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon). Sonny rustles some feathers as he takes a seat behind the car, and drives in a manner that the sport does not approve of, too rough, too American. He’s a smart Alec guy, and he knows the best way to not only drive the car, but design the car, how to handle the press, everything!

It’s at this point that the film starts becoming tedious. The older American guy coming in, knowing how to save not only the driving, but the design is a kind of white savior fable we haven’t really had to deal with in a minute. It’s important to remember that this story is fictional, they could have done a lot of things with it, but Kosinski and his writers went with a plot where Brad Pitt doesn’t need to have any interiority conflict. If anything it’s everyone around him that is having a crisis of faith. He teaches Kate how to design the car better, he teaches Ruben how to handle the press better, he even teaches Joshua to be on his phone less! Those dang kids! They’re on their phones too much!

Luckily during the races you can at least be distracted by rocket cars driving at insanely dangerous speeds as the engines deafen your ears. Strapping a camera to an F1 racer and shooting it down a racetrack is a very engaging way to make a film, so those sequences absolutely stun. When cars spin out you gasp, as Sonny or Joshua shoot past opponents you cheer. It’s something that makes the film all the more frustrating knowing that the really difficult technical stuff looks and sounds unreal, while the plot feels like a paint by numbers grab bag of sports biopic tropes.

The most frustrating part of the movie is when technical directory McKenna and Sonny begin to have a romantic connection. This woman, who has almost certainly worked harder that anyone on the team, is going to risk her career to smooch a man twenty years her senior who lives in a van, has three ex wives, and is an avowed gambling addict is a suspension of disbelief I refuse to get on board with. And I famously love it when people kiss! I could also probably forgive it if it ever felt like Condon and Pitt had any kind of chemistry whatsoever. Surely Academy Award Nominee Kerry Condon deserves characters better written that this! It does not help that the only other woman on the pit crew is constantly fumbling her job at the beginning of the movie. Neither woman feels like it was written with any sense of agency, only echoes of women in the workforce through an insanely male lens.

It’s stunning that something that’s based on actual events like Ford v Ferrari is a much more exciting and interesting story, than this which was created out of whole cloth. By choosing to do a fictional plot they could have done anything! And while I am admittedly not overly familiar with the sport I imagine there are real events in F1 history that are considerably more interesting than what they landed on for the plot of F1: The Movie. So much of it is technically jaw dropping, but the dull story beats are impossible to ignore.

2.5/5