‘F1’ REVIEW: A Formula for Success
‘F1’ REVIEW: A Formula for Success
Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes in F1 The Movie | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Philippines
Part of what made director Joseph Kosinski’s previous film, Top Gun: Maverick, effective was that it was functionally a sports movie, not a war movie. Maverick climaxes with a military operation conducted against a nameless, faceless enemy. We’re spared the specific details because we don’t need them.
What we do see, and what is so thrilling to watch, is an ace veteran leading a ragtag underdog team and pulling off a difficult feat against the highest odds and the biggest doubters — the spectacular culmination of several training montages, team-building exercises, and pep talks. It’s like Coach Carter with jet planes.
F1, Kosinski’s latest directorial effort, takes those exact same bones and applies them to a true-blue sports movie set in the world of Formula One. If I end up drawing comparisons to Maverick throughout this review, it is only because the elevator pitch for F1 was clearly “Top Gun, but in cars”. It might sound ridiculous, but that’s ultimately not a slight.
Damson Idris as Joshua Pearce in F1 The Movie | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Philippines
Where Maverick was led by the sheer moviestardom of Tom Cruise, F1 has Brad Pitt occupying the veteran driver’s seat as Sonny Hayes, an aging has-been driver who never reached his full potential. His counterpart on the underdog team is Joshua Pearce, a young, brash, cocky rookie played by Damson Idris. Rounding out the team are Kerry Condon, who plays the technical director and leads them on the track, and Javier Bardem, who plays the team owner. The difficult feat this time around? To win a single race. The doubters are Bardem’s own boardroom, who threaten to oust him from his position should the team fail to win one race out of the remaining nine in the season.
You can imagine how the rest of the story unfolds from there. Stop me if this sounds familiar. There’s a reluctant mentor-mentee relationship between the veteran and rookie, who clash over how the game should be played. There’s some romance on the side, there’s a little corporate sabotage sprinkled in for greater drama, there’s violent crashes and split-second wins. There are training montages, team-building exercises, and pep talks. F1 takes no surprising turns. However generic that might sound, the film mostly delivers on exactly what it says it's going to be. And there are far worse things a film could be.
If your ticket says F1 on it, all you really need to see are cars going very, very, very fast. And boy, do these cars just fly. The filmmakers take all the technology and techniques they developed for Top Gun and bring it down from the sky to the racetrack, and to great effect. It’s a very dynamic film to watch. Multiple cameras are rigged onto the cars and capture every intense detail. It is an immersive experience. In one moment, you’re barreling headfirst down the track, in the driver’s point-of-view, shaking with every thundering pulse of the engine, then in the next, the camera swivels back to capture the driver in close-up, and you’re right there in the cockpit with them, watching the actors muster every ounce of emotion they can through just their eyes.
Kosinski and company have nailed how to use the camera to render speed and power, and to communicate different emotions. You’ll watch from really low on the ground, underneath the car, as the world blazes furiously, then up top in a bird’s eye view as the cars weave around one another in a hypnotic, balletic dance. The filmmakers cover every inch of the car, utilizing perspectives you wouldn’t even think of. At one point, we see Pitt and Idris from behind their steering wheels, their fingers gripped on every turn and obscuring their faces from the shot. The editing is also extremely sharp.
There is a quick-cut pit stop that is so exhilarating it’s worth the price of admission alone. Narratively, the races are made as easy to follow as possible. We hear commentators as though it is genuine TV coverage of the races, and are often shown flashes of race placement as it goes along. The objective could also not be simpler. “Finish faster than anyone else” is as easy and engaging as any goal. Even as a non-F1 fan, at their best, I found the racing sequences to be downright breathtaking.
Kerry Condon as Kate McKenna in F1 The Movie | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Philippines
One of the key ingredients to making the action in Top Gun: Maverick work wasn’t just shooting the planes in interesting ways, but cutting away to see others reacting to the action. I think of the shot of Charles Parnell as Rear Admiral Warlock raising his fist as Maverick accomplishes the impossible maneuver as a moment that really sells the gravity of that scene. F1 is chock-full of moments like that. Kerry Condon and Javier Bardem might seem overqualified for roles that are more or less stock characters, but when you see them gripped by race, it's hard not to follow suit. They’re both very game performers and supply the necessary amount of charisma to bring to life otherwise generic roles. Likewise, Damson Idris brings the right edge and youth to the social media generation version of the brash rookie archetype.
Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes in F1 The Movie | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Philippines
Unfortunately, it’s Pitt’s performance as Sonny Hayes that ends up falling flat. Whereas Tom Cruise in Maverick thrives off the cultural memory and iconography of his character — the shades, the jacket, the motorcycle — and wears the passage of time well, Sonny Hayes is not a character that is deeply embedded in pop culture as much as the film tries to sell him as that. Hayes ends up as a loose amalgam of tropes that don’t make sense together. He is both personable and genial with the team, with the exception of the rookie Pearce, but he is also a man-with-no-name type that you’d find in Westerns, nomads who go from town to town, fixing their problems before leaving and returning to their endless wandering.
He’s an ace driver, great enough to be plucked from relative obscurity and dropped into Formula One at 60, but also mostly occupies a scrappy, bottom-of-the-pack position like a hard-hitting but ultimately limited role player. Perhaps a different actor or performance could square all those contradictions into something interesting, but Pitt practically sleepwalks through this thing, leaning on the smile and a pair of Ray Bans to do for him what it does for other movie stars. Any attempt to philosophize what racing truly means doesn’t work because Pitt doesn’t seem engaged in the material. He’ll look out into the distance, eyes glazed, and he’ll say the lines he needs to say, but it never feels like we are watching a real person. Despite the limitations of performing behind a helmet and visor and being trapped in a tight cockpit, Pitt’s performance is strangely better whenever he’s in the car. The only time we really get a sense of who this character is is in how his car moves.
It says something about the film’s craft that it manages to be so thrilling despite a lead performance that is never quite convincing. What F1 lacks in interpersonal drama, it more than makes up for in dramatics on the race track. It’s hard not to root for the underdogs, no matter how many times we’ve seen them topple the odds. And when the camera puts you right in the front seat of a rocket engine, it’s hard not to lean forward and become absorbed into the scenery. It is a thrill-ride through and through, and one of the few times I could see a film being enhanced by a 4DX experience. It might be a formula you’ve seen done before, but you haven’t seen it done quite like this. “Top Gun, but in cars” is as thrilling — if vapid — as it sounds.
‘F1’ is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
