Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Apple Films
F1: THE MOVIE— 4 STARS
LESSON #1: A TRUE KINETIC MOVIE— It helps that it’s a racing movie at its core, but F1 reminds me of a term I’ve tried to coin over the years between reviews of 2012’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt headliner Premium Rush and Edgar Wright’s maniacal Baby Driver from 2017. It’s the concept of an action subgenre I label as a “kinetic movie.” True examples of this term have their characters, cameras, and settings moving in some way, shape, or form. Kinetic movies are snappy and relentless, but are never brainless. Even if tropes or over-the-top acts are involved, they are crafty enough to bring the audience into their quickened pace without exhausting their conceits and gimmicks in the first hour. Through it all, time is their number one element, and they operate with a payoff in mind. That’s F1 to a T.
The man who keeps F1 moving is the oldest member of the main cast. Academy Award winner Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former upstart Formula One driver who left the sport during his rookie season in the 1990s era of Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna after severe injuries sustained in a gruesome crash at the Spanish Grand Prix. Since then, he’s been a twice-divorced, poker-playing ex-New York City cabbie living out of a lifted Ford Econoline camper van with a surfboard and a dirt bike rachet-strapped to it. F1 introduces Sonny going through his superstitious pre-race routine to suit up for the night shift of the 24 Hours of Daytona competition, where he improbably takes the shaky team car from seventh to first during his leg of the endurance race against drivers half his age, much to the “let him race” delight of Shea Whigham’s team owner Chip Hart.
LESSON #2: LET HIM RACE INDEED— This opening scene, complete with the start of incredible camera work from Oscar-winning Life of Pi cinematographer Claudio Miranda and a brawny beat from composer Hans Zimmer that will follow Hayes and company all movie long, establishes much about who this man is and how he operates. Sonny Hayes, on paper, is a has-been bordering on a never-was who has built a checkered past and urban legend status as a mercenary driver-for-hire. While he certainly loves the paychecks, what Sonny is honestly chasing is his personal quintessence of “flying,” where the pace, line, and feel of a race are going so perfectly that time and speed melt away. That sweet spot of comfort over adrenaline is his chosen high.
Someone who knows this about Sonny is his old Formula One rival, Ruben Cervantes, played by fellow Oscar winner Javier Bardem. Retired from the cockpit, Ruben is now the team owner of the struggling APXGP team in Formula One. Led by a promising young driver named Joshua Pearce (Outside the Wire’s Damson Idris), APX is in last place and scoreless on the season scoreboard with nine races to go. A testy board of directors, represented by Outlander villain Tobias Menzies’s Peter Banning, is likely to oust Ruben and clean house after the season without actual points or, ultimately, a win to show for their millions of invested capital. Desperate to find a mentoring teammate for Pearce and a knowledgable driver able to give tangible handling notes to technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon of The Banshees of Inishirin), Ruben turns to Sonny at truck stop and talks him into returning to his old haunt of F1, prompting just about everyone in the garage and beyond to declare “Who’s this asshole?”
LESSON #3: THE WHEELED CHESS OF FORMULA ONE TEAM RACING– In a different racing movie with two roosters in the henhouse—one young and one old—F1 would rely on a pissing contest of straight speed and ego measurement. Think “rubbin’ is racing” from Days of Thunder. While speed ultimately vaults the fastest F1 driver to the checkered flag, this racing league is built on positional advantage gained from teamwork track strategies, engineering edge, calculated fuel and tire decisions, and dangerous risks you will, beyond hope, to break your way. As McKenna’s character puts it, you have twenty teams “fighting to the death for a tenth of a second.” Seeing that type of patient and long-game racing is an informative experience. Training and racing montages juxtapose the new school versus the old school approaches, battling noise and focus, between Pearce and Hayes. The plot of the film, written by former Transformers series scribe and Top Gun: Maverick Oscar nominee Ehren Kruger, banks and corners like a sports film from there, with different narrative severities of turns matching the unique tracks being conquered in the film.
Sonny Hayes gets by on conditioning, confidence, and guile, not unlike Brad Pitt himself at this stage of his illustrious career. Every bit a movie star showing off in a proudly vibrant summer film, Pitt is channeling the bravery and coolness of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, who came before him. Newman was 44 when he made Winning, and McQueen was 41 with Le Mans and later wouldn’t live past 50. Here’s Brad Pitt, north of 60, putting himself behind the action wheel of these furious machines for stunt coordinator Adam Kirley (The Little Mermaid) alongside Damson Idris and real racers like the bankrolling producer and 7-time series champion Lewis Hamilton.
The champion’s personal involvement next to legendary Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer was to ensure his sport came out looking like the billions of bucks poured into it each season. Sure enough, the elitism of the F1 sport brought elitism of filmmaking that succeeded in that task. Perfect for the skill and savvy required of a true “kinetic movie,” director Joseph Kosinski was the ideal hire for F1: The Movie. To follow Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, and Top Gun: Maverick with this crisp, charming, and screaming banshee of a movie vaults him over the likes of Michael Bay, Justin Lin, and J.J. Abrams and next to Christopher McQuarrie and James Cameron as the best mayhem conductors and action storytellers working today.
LESSON #4: HOW DO THEY MAKE IT LOOK AND SOUND SO GOOD?— The pulse-spiking thrills of F1’s IMAX-sized action sequences exemplify Kosinski’s high-quality filmmaking and will leave you gobsmacked and impressed. On the racecar front, Bourne franchise action vehicle supervisor Graham Kelly moves those aerodynamic gasoline dragons every which way, giving the aforementioned Claudio Miranda a plethora of mounts and positions to track, whip, zoom, and pan the balletic and perilous movement. As evident by The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Top Gun: Maverick, Miranda knows how to do two things, among many, really well: capture the best vehicle-mounted film footage in the business and make Brad Pitt look dreamy. Traffic Academy Award winner Stephen Mirrione hones the rest with expert splicing and shot selection variety in the editor’s chair. Very few features this enormous at 156 minutes have ever expedited time so well or sustained so many spiked pulse rates.
Right on down to frequent fireworks that reach a Blow Out level of enveloping, spectacular dazzle, the athletic and moviemaking muscles are flexing in tandem to a stupendous degree in F1: The Movie. Goodness gracious, you could bottle this movie’s testosterone and outsell Nugenix and burn the publishing presses of Men’s Health to the ground with its vigor. Through it all, there Brad Pitt is, glowing like a lithe, tanned, and tattooed demigod putting everyone else to shame.
