I’m not a sports guy, as pretty much anybody who knows anything about me knows, and my general interest in Formula One is essentially nonexistent. However, the new movie F1 has Brad Pitt in a leading role, and he’s a reliably charismatic screen presence. There’s also the writer and the director of the better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be Top Gun: Maverick. That’s promising. And hey, Jerry Bruckheimer produced it? If nothing else, this one has a strong possibility of being a crowd-pleaser. That could count for a lot.
Besides, it strikes me that, in another universe, this movie would star Tom Cruise instead.
Sonny Hayes (Pitt) is a veteran race car driver who lives out of his van and will race for anyone just because, but he won’t become the permanent member of any race team or organization. In his youth, he’d been an up-and-coming Formula One driver, but after playing a key role in winning the Daytona 500, he’s approached by his former F1 teammate Reuben (Javier Bardem) to join Reuben’s own team. Reuben is deep in debt after purchasing the team, and if he doesn’t pull off at least one victory in the back-half of the season, then the board will force him to sell. That would lead to everyone currently working for the team to be laid off and replaced, and Reuben has a very promising rookie, one Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris).
As it is, Sonny’s initial reluctance to join the team is short-lived, but he’s hardly welcomed to the team as soon as he arrives, causing tension not only with Pierce, but with the techs, mechanics, and engineers, most notably Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the first female technical director in Formula One history. But Sonny has been around the block, and he knows racing. Will the others listen and learn from him, and can they all work together to pull off a victory and save everyone’s jobs?
Now, a movie like this one, it has to do one thing for me: make me care about something I normally have no interests in. I’m not even remotely interested in racing. I leave that to my motorhead cousin. I know going into a movie like this one, knowing who is working on it behind the scenes, that Sonny is probably going to win a race when he really needs to, and he and Pierce will become close. It’s more about the journey than the result for a movie like this one. So, it is up to the movie to make me care with compelling race scenes. As far as that goes, it does better for me in the beginning than it does in the end. As the movie goes on, and various rules for the racers come out, I was not always 100% why some things were happening. There was one race, one in the middle of the movie, that worked very well for me, but overall, this is a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, so there is a strong sense to the movie that it is following a formula, and there weren’t any real surprises to it.
But then there’s Pitt as Sunny. He makes the movie what it is with his usual charisma. Various characters call Sunny an asshole over the course of the movie, but he sure doesn’t come across as one so much as the new guy that no one wants to listen to because he actually is the new guy. He’s not mean or anything more than stubborn. Pierce comes across as more of the asshole as the showboat athlete type while Sunny is actually talking to the pit crew like they’re human beings. He’s not all that abrasive. What he is is charming. Even when I saw the movie as something of a familiar story being retold with different faces, I still found myself enjoying it. Make of that what you will. It’s just good summer fare.
Grade: B+
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