F1
F1 the Movie

Top Gun mavericks, Joseph Kosinski and Jerry Bruckheimer, follow up their great blockbuster throwback with this silly but satisfying car racing epic starring Brad Pitt in the Tom Cruise slot. Pitt plays outsider, loner, mysterious, washed-up but still kickin' stock car racing legend Sonny Hayes, who is coaxed back into the game by his former rival and now old buddy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to lead a floundering Formula 1 team. He's there to mix things up, mentor, and butt heads with the team's young hotshot driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), but he also just might get one more chance at victory himself. In addition to clashing with Pearce, Cervantes, the team principal, Kaspar Smolinski (Kim Bodnia), and everyone connected with the Expensify APXGP F1 Team, he also spars with the technical director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon). She's the first female technical director in Formula One and thus has a lot to prove; so, naturally, she does pretty much whatever Pitt's character tells her to do and jumps into bed with him once she's decided he's not that much of an asshole. Sonny Hayes breaks every rule in the book and defies a life-threatening injury to make his team a winner and bring himself fame and fortune (though, as he frequently points out, it's not about the money).

This movie is, most assuredly, all about the money, and we can see on screen every dollar spent by Apple Studios, Warner Bros., and each company that ponied up for product placement. In fairness, this is the "sport" that is most honest about who owns everything. (I wish politicians and media outlets had to wear corporate logos emblazoned across their chests and desks so we would see who owns them before we even heard them utter a single word.) Auto racing is garishly ugly, but this movie makes it look ultra cool. That's especially true if you can see the film in IMAX. It's a lot of fun, though I would imagine it would be at least 70% less fun watching it at home.

It would be silly to complain that Formula 1 follows a formula; the narrative is as fixed as the circular tracks these cars race around. What makes movies like this enjoyable is the same as what (I assume) makes these races exciting: how good is the car, how well does the guy drive the car, and how well does the team supporting him deliver? At first, the story seems too rote to engage with, but at the first significant set piece, it hooks you in. That set piece is a race in which Sonny uses his superior knowledge, cunning, swagger, and skill to bend the rules without breaking them and outplay everyone else on the track; not winning the race but winning over everyone on his skeptical, ragtag team of overly cautious, inside-the-box, wannabe winners. This sequence is what we come to this kind of movie for, and it delivers the goods nicely. I wish anything that followed were as satisfying as that sequence, but the movie had me from that point, and it never lost me.

A Hollywood extravaganza about cool auto racers is never gonna be as exciting as a blockbuster about impossibly sexy fighter pilots who are the best of the best. But while FI may not be as good as Top Gun: Maverick, it handily achieves what I would consider the minimal requirement for this picture to qualify: it bests Bruckheimer's high-octane NASCAR picture from thirty-five years ago, the Tony Scott-directed Tom Cruise "vehicle" Days of Thunder. I would say it's also a good deal better than Howard Hawks' Red Line 7000 and James Mangold's Ford v Ferrari, but it's not in the same league as John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix. (I don't know what it says about this sports movie sub-genre that Ron Howard, of all people, may have made the best entry in it with Rush.)

Post-Maverick, Kosinski and Bruckheimer now seem to possess the confidence to go full '80s throwback in ways they seemed a little too cautious to in their Top Gun legacyquel. So we get some good old-fashioned montages set to classic and contemporary pop songs, and the male and female leads get to go to bed with each other (no "Take My Breath Away" love montage, unfortunately—maybe in the next film they'll find that level of courage). The picture also benefits from the same 'you-are-there' verisimilitude that made Maverick so damn cool. These filmmakers take the time and expense to shoot in the locations where their movie is set, placing their actors inside the real cars and amongst the real crowds of the actual races, rather than digitally inserting them. As with Maverick, cameras were rigged inside the vehicles to capture the actors as they maneuvered at high speeds. You don't get this when you do it all in the computer, shooting your few human elements on green screens. I celebrate the return, however brief and thin it may be, of Hollywood blockbusters that haven't forgotten what makes Hollywood blockbusters so much fun.