Original caricature by Jeff York of Damson Idris, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt in F1: THE MOVIE (copyright 2025)
You can practically set your watch (okay, stop watch) by the “lone hero” tropes and clichés at play in F1® THE MOVIE, but damn if they don’t work like gangbusters. In a summer movie season that has already seen certain sure-fire winners underperform – ahem, MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: THE FINAL RECKONING – the latest from star Brad Pitt and director Joseph Kosinski delivers thrills, stunts, and gleaming production values like few blockbusters these days.
The story finds aging driver Sonny Hayes (Pitt) making a hard-scrabble living by performing fill-in work on the track for racing teams that need an assured hand behind the wheel for the final leg of relay races. Back in the day, Sonny was pegged to be the next big thing in Formula One, but a bad crash sidelined him and took away a lot of his mojo. But age and wisdom have managed to restore Sonny’s cockiness and chutzpah and his old buddy and fellow racer Ruben (Javier Bardem) knows it. That’s why he recruits Sonny to bring his acumen and assuredness to the racing team he’s now managing, including the mentoring of a talented but naïve racer named Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris, charming despite his character being a bit of a wet blanket).
Do you think that Sonny and Joshua will have instant disdain for each other? Will Sonny ruffle the feathers of everyone on the team? And will he skirt conventional practices on and off the track, preferring instead to find his own maverick approach to training and race strategy? Of course, of course, and no shit. 15 minutes in, you’ve set your watch. We’ve all seen such stuff from previous racing films (WINNING, LE MANS), most sports stories (RAGING BULL, THE NATURAL), and dare I say, any films about artists (LUST FOR LIFE, THE BRUTALIST). Indeed, Hayes is a maverick, just like Tom Cruise’s Maverick character from TOP GUN: MAVERICK, a film that Kosinski happened to direct. But like that film, Kosinski knows how to bring his A game. His team shoots and edits the action crisply, the compositions and production design are exquisite, and Hans Zimmer’s throbbing score pulses like it’s an EKG machine. A tony cast, including Tobias Menzies, Shea Wigham, and Kim Bosnia, and other sharp actors, breathe life into the supporting Pitt crew and keep their energy up to match all the kinetics dotting around them.
Standing out amongst the players are Kerry Condon, the team’s wind and velocity specialist Kate, bringing a lot of quiet sass to her part, and the invaluable Bardem, looking handsome and slim in his custom suits and relishing every quip he’s given. His Ruben is so sly and interesting a character, I only wish there were more of him in the movie.
Most of what is in the movie, of course, is high velocity action, sound design, and POV racing shots that put you on the track in the cars. It’s a rush to say the least, only made more authentic by the production shadowing the actual Formula One circuit one season to give it all the more authenticity. Kudos to the second unit too for getting all kinds of behind-the-scene footage as well which only adds to the realness of it all. And while I doubt that Pitt or Idris did most of their driving, it’s very hard to tell what is faked, CGI, or rear-screen projected.
Kosinski does let his film go on a half hour too long and you can see where the finale is headed 40 laps out. Still, it’s done so well, it’s hard not to admire such expertise playing across our eyes, including the ever handsome charmer that is Pitt. He even makes the senior angst of Hayes as noble as his ageless zest for his profession. Surely, such joy will be shared by those who watch this crowd-pleasing actioner all summer.
