'F1 Review': Brad Pitt's Racing Drama Sails (When It Isn't Riding the Brakes)

Pitt and crew are in fine form with a race car drama short of surprises but high on technical beauty

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The race car drama is a genre with tropes so established it’s like a music biopic. Nearly everyone has a Talladega Nights line they can throw out while watching a movie about a man and his love of fast cars (“This sign is dangerous and off-putting but I do love me Fig Newtons”). So whether it’s Rush, Ford v. Ferrari or Brad Pitt’s F1, it comes at a bit of a disadvantage because the formula is so well-known: once hot/promising racer suffers devastating event and is has to beat the odds to come back and win.

Director Joseph Kosinski does nothing to change that and, if anything, lifts heavily from his Top Gun: Maverick star Tom Cruise’s own established race car drama, Days of Thunder. But Kosinski and crew know audiences aren’t coming for the story. They came to race, and dammit F1 gives it to them. For what the movie lacks in narrative compulsion, it makes up for in a technically wondrous series of sequences.

Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) was a once promising Formula 1 driver who, after a devastating accident in the 1990s, walked away from F1 to race stateside. He lives in a trailer and generally has zero purpose in life until he’s reunited with friend Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem). Cervantes runs the F1 team Apex GP, but after three failed seasons the team is at risk of being sold. Ruben needs a driver who can turn everything around. Though reluctant, Sonny takes the opportunity to join the team and immediately clashes with its young star driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).

Considering Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Krueger’s last team-up, 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, it’s not surprising this feels like Tom Cruise should be in the title role. Sonny Hayes is a guy who comes out of his tuna can/home to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and is the guy you allow to “let do his thing.” He’s a rebel, he’s a loose cannon, he’s a…maverick, you might say. We meet Sonny as he’s competing in the Daytona 500 and it’s this scene that is the film’s highpoint. Claudio Miranda’s fantastic cinematography—best rendered on an IMAX screen, if you have the opportunity—lushly showcases the artistry of the drive. As fireworks pop off in the frame it’s an exquisite moment that the movie chases throughout the rest of its runtime. It’s not that the other drive scenes aren’t equally stunning, but it’s this moment where everything just makes you gasp in awe.

Sonny flirts the line between being a man of the past and the present. He’s followed by a litany of “dad jams,” from Billy Squier to Queen, and he grouses to young whippersnapper Pearce about participation medals while speaking exclusively in race-related trailer lines like “Who’s fighting? I’m racing.” Characters tell Sonny he’s an asshole numerous times, though the movie never wants us to see that as anything more than charm. Pitt tends to work best these days opposite an equally strong co-lead (Clooney or DiCaprio, for example), and here he’s forced to hold up the entirety of F1 and it only goes so far. His smile is meant to keep us on his side, but there’s little background to him that doesn’t seem cobbled together from Rebel Playbook 101. Ruben sums him up in one sentence as “a gambling Junkie who missed his shot.” The quickest of references are made to his dad dying young, and two random shots of a man and a child (implied to be Sonny and his Pop) are all we get towards any significant background.

And said background is only in service to his animosity with the young Pearce, who seems equally underwritten. Where Sonny isn’t the media, being a brand, or having a cell phone, Pearce harps on how “ancient” Sonny. He’s written how you’d expect a screenwriter in his fifties would see Gen Z and Alpha today, as spoiled children more content to chase fame than have any sense of skill. And yet Pearce’s story is the most compelling in a way the script never acknowledges. Pearce is a Black driver in a competition where there’s only ever been a lone Black F1 driver, that being Lewis Hamilton who, not surprising, is a producer on this and is referred to in the finale. There’s no discussion of his challenges as a Black racer and how much of his attempt to brand and make money is because of his marginalization in a sport that continues to exclude people like him.

But, hey, at least this movie makes a point of saying women are in F1. Kerry Condon plays Kate, a role that Jennifer Connelly or Rebecca Ferguson could play in their sleep. Condon is sweet and has a strong brogue but there’s little to her character other than she understands wind and is attracted to Sonny. It’s a stretch to call her anything other than “the girlfriend.” Another equally cute, and blonde, female mechanic also gets more screen time. It’s funny how this movie acknowledges misogyny in the sport more often than racism.

Idris is an intimidating presence, but the script never lets him break out because Pitt is the focus. The two butt heads before eventually having a begrudging friendship, but with another hour in the storyline the movie puts Pearce into a car accident that kicks him out of racing (and out of the screen) for long stretches. By the time he returns, he and Sonny are back to butting heads as if the first hour accomplished nothing in their relationship.

Thankfully, the bevy of racing sequences keeps the story from dragging things down too much. Although, any time there aren’t fast cars on the screen you’re desperately waiting for them to come back and liven things up. The eventual third act does fall into racer formula, with Ruben plaintively stating Sonny is “driving angry” at one point. (Bardem is far too good for this movie, by the way. The role is thankless but he brings such a warmth to a stock character.)

Everything and everyone is in service to Sonny, who becomes a bit of a race car Messiah by the time F1 is over. It’s not that F1 is a bad movie, just a painfully silly one, and that can work if it’s what you’re seeking. On its own it’s a stock race car movie whose magnetic visuals do a lot to help an uninspired story. Idris is great but everyone swirls around Pitt, who isn’t given anything beyond a typical Brad Pitt performance. If Tom Cruise was in this movie, what might have been, and it’s hard not to keep thinking that while watching.

Grade: C-

F1 is in theaters Friday.

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