Below-the-line brilliance lifts a melodramatic script that pushes the audience’s suspension of disbelief to the limit.
★★★☆☆
Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a nomadic racing driver, is approached by Ruben (Javier Bardem) to join his struggling F1 team three decades after Sonny last raced in F1. He is joined by his teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a cocky rookie with a short temper, and Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), a trailblazing technical director. Together, they must secure a win before the end of the season—or the team will be sold.
In recent years, the F1 brand has been expanding its reach further and further, thanks to its clever use of social media and Netflix’s Drive to Survive series. Attempting to appeal to both new and established fans has been a precarious balancing act—and that’s its biggest problem with this inaugural movie tie-in.
The film’s story takes liberties with the real-life F1 world that an audience member with a basic awareness of how the organisation operates would find many of the story beats completely preposterous. F1 bends over backwards to bring in authentic F1 journalists to voice the exact concerns that the audience member has and look to the camera as if to say, “Yes, we know a fifty-year-old driver breaking all the set rules of F1 and crashing in almost every race is insane, but bear with us”. To begin with, you accept that someone like Hayes could potentially enter the sport, but as you start to see the way in which he races, you realise there is no way on earth that someone like Hayes would be allowed to continue.
The character of Sonny Hayes is an interesting one; it certainly feels like an all-grown-up version of Tom Cruise’s Cole Trickle from Days of Thunder (1990). This former confident know-it-all who was forced to leave racing after a serious accident and who had to find a way to love racing again, is a very romantic idea of a character. He’s a figure that the general audience will absolutely warm to—and when you add in Pitt’s charm, it does work. Joshua Pearce, on the other hand, is not as well-written. All Pearce has is cockiness, which wears on you after a while. If the story brought his arc forward a little and made the character more likeable earlier on, then maybe he would be a character the audience would want to root for. As it stands, he’s just annoying.
Visually, F1 is phenomenal. The bold decision to put the actors in real, modified F2 cars at the actual race weekends pays off, as they seamlessly look like a proper team challenging in the 2023 season. The cinematography during the races is outstanding, easily overtaking the groundbreaking work of 2019’s Ford v Ferrari. Placing cameras all around the car puts the audience in the driver’s seat with Pitt, creating some nail-biting scenes. The editing on this is fantastic; it’s sharp and impactful, moving the story at a good pace, which could have been a struggle given the numerous races to cover. Hans Zimmer’s booming soundtrack is also a massive highlight, and certainly some of his best work.
The Verdict
Director Joseph Kosinski assembled the perfect crew to make a spectacular-looking racing film, but for those familiar with F1, this might be too far-fetched to enjoy.
Words by Jordon Searle
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