F1: The Movie – Brad Pitt's spectacular racing drama is Barbie for dads

Telegraph

7 hours ago

Is this summer's officially branded Formula One film the new Top Gun: Maverick? It's certainly straining every sinew to make you think as much. Unlike the 2022 Tom Cruise blockbuster, F1 sits a few hundred feet below the pinnacle of modern blockbuster showmanship: it's rousing, sleek entertainment rather than transcendent pop cinema – even though in pure sales-pitch terms, a Venn diagram of the two would resemble a hula hoop.
In Brad Pitt, it has the 1980s-minted movie star lead playing a wayward yet gifted (and ruggedly handsome) veteran who's pressed back into service to show the youngsters how it's done. While in Joseph Kosinski and Ehren Kruger it has the same safe-pair-of-hands director and screenwriter, intent on hitting all the summer movie beats of a generation ago, punctuated with plenty of armrest-shredding cockpit photography, captured with a fearlessness you can feel in your limbic system, and no visible digital tricks.
Yet there is another recent studio hit with which it arguably shares just as much of its DNA. Behind its dewy-eyed machismo and breath-stopping technique, F1 is essentially Barbie for dads: a crafty brand extension exercise that gets away with it through sheer implementational brilliance. To put it another way, there are a hundred possible versions of this film that are awful, and Kosinski and his team have made none of them.
Pitt is puppyishly charming, if not quite Cruise-level magnetic, as Sonny Hayes – a crumpled Steve McQueen type and one-time leading light of the 1990s racing scene. His career was ended prematurely by a crash in the 1993 Spanish Grand Prix – while neck-and-neck with Ayrton Senna, no less – though his driverly intuition and nerve have endured. (That really is Pitt driving in the cockpit shots, albeit in a modified Formula Two car, which your non-F1-fan of a critic presumes must be exactly one formula slower than the terrifying aerodynamic beasts shown on screen.)
During Sonny's two-decade absence, his flashier former comrade (Javier Bardem) has sidestepped into management, and now owns his own team, Apex Grand Prix: they're on a losing streak, things are desperate, and you can already guess what the last-ditch rescue plan is.
Britain's own Damson Idris makes hay with the role of Pitt's new teammate Joshua Pearce, an ambitious, impulsive young Londoner still finding his feet in the sport and the circus surrounding it, while an extremely good-value Kerry Condon is Apex's cool-headed technical director, who brings expertise and nous behind the scenes.
This quartet's personalities clash then mesh in all the obvious ways throughout a season that takes Apex from the back of the grid at Silverstone to jockeying for pole position at Abu Dhabi's Yas Marina. But while the film feels monkishly devoted to its subject-slash-product (lots of jargon and driver cameos), those with no prior knowledge of and/or interest in Formula One aren't left to twist in the wind.
Commentators constantly explain the rules during the race scenes themselves, and there is much radio chatter about the outrageously unorthodox nature of Pitt's various strategies on the track. (Though note that the first red flag to start flapping around Tobias Menzies' vaguely Muskian investor is that he now feels au fait with the sport after having binged Netflix's F1 documentary series Drive to Survive.)
Does the film's corporate tie-in status have a dampening effect? Well, the stakes are never allowed to feel too life-threatening, and rival teams never serve as villains: amusingly, after a Ferrari employee exhibits a mere wisp of poor sportsmanship, we cut instantly to various triumphal shots of the company logo, backed by an old-fashioned blare-a-thon of a Hans Zimmer soundtrack.
Yet for the most part F1 feels faithful rather than hamstrung, and the peerless race photography and deft writing around Pitt's character – a late moment involving a pack of cards is even rather moving – are enough to smooth over the niggles. It's a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.