“Welcome to the human race,” cried the adorably dumb slogan of a now-forgotten film starring Sylvester Stallone as a retired race car driver pulled back onto the track to mentor a hotheaded young talent. Driven (2001, dir. Renny Harlin) has a better title and is, without question, more enjoyable when watched drunk, thanks to its mix of soap-melodrama, early-2000s techno, and absurd scenarios. But its glossier, more expensive counterpart, F1: The Movie (dir. Joseph Kosinski), is catching up fast.    

The giveaway is right there in the title. First and foremost, this is a swagger move by a marketing department that essentially made itself a $200 million promotional reel – starring Brad Pitt (now in the “Benjamin Button” stage of his career), with full access to every license plastered across every inch of F1’s hyper-branded cars and real-life drivers (Lewis Hamilton is a producer, and his colleagues/rivals Verstappen, Sainz, Alonso etc. pop up as NPCs).

F1: The Movie is an attempt by the producer-director-screenwriter team of Top Gun: Maverick to stuff the viewer inside a $150 million single-seater, following to the letter the formula that worked so well for fighter jets.

Sonny Hayes (Pitt) was once a rising star in Formula 1, until a crash during a 1993 overtake on Ayrton Senna derailed his career. Thirty years later, an old teammate/rival (Javier Bardem, curiously credited “as Ruben,” like a debuting child actor) convinces him to return to the circuit to help salvage a team that hasn’t scored points in three years, and mentor a young, promising but inconsistent (sound familiar?) driver, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris). I’m not sure if AI could write a decent script based on this absurd and unoriginal premise, but I can definitely imagine it putting screenwriter Ehren Kruger out of a job.

Sonny lives in a trailer (much like Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the character he’s partly modeled after), he’s a “lone wolf,” a “cowboy” who trains analog-style with playing cards and rubber balls, unlike his young teammate Joshua, who is wired to every imaginable physical performance tracker and feeds his fandom through social media. Pitt’s wrinkles (muted by cosmetic work and digital retouching, but still visible) stand out against the dust-averse chrome surfaces of the cars – don’t forget, the actor is only two years younger than Senna would be today. A few lukewarm age-related jokes, some ice baths, and a couple of references to second-act drivers like Louis Chiron (from the 1950s, when F1 was a very different sport) aren’t enough to mask the film’s fundamental dissonance: the apparent realism of its technical simulation clashes heavily with the utterly implausible story it’s chosen to tell.

As a viewer with a very limited understanding of Formula 1 rules – especially without the timeless commentary of Miki Alexandrescu to filter them – and even less of the fan experience (paying an arm and a leg for a view of a corner that the cars will take about 60 times per race), I found the most compelling moments to be the ones where Kosinski uses his unprecedented access – granted by the usually secretive F1 gods – to peek under the hood and validate F1 as a sport, not just a show. There are meetings where pit stop strategy is hashed out, tire compound choices debated, and wind tunnel tests discussed – all those details impossible to catch with the naked eye when cars are flying by at 300 km/h. The fictional team, APX GP – who pay Sonny’s salary – are bottom of the standings (Ted Lasso-style), and must resort to borderline-legal tactics, which opens up intriguing questions about the driver-vs-machine hierarchy. I can imagine a true fan of the sport finding plenty to appreciate here.

Undeniably, the racing sequences are spectacular (with an aesthetic not unlike that of Gran Turismo, 2023), even if chaotically edited and indifferently scored by Hans Zimmer – the James Patterson of film composers. Still, the lasting impression is that you’ve just sat through a focus group for a product launch.

Peel back the smoke screen of a half-baked subplot involving industrial espionage and cold-blooded corporate pragmatists who see F1 purely as a business, and you’ll find more branding than in a Bond film. Everyone drinks Heineken 0.0, like Verstappen. And Abu Dhabi gets a final-scene advertorial so cloying – fireworks, luxury cars, sheikhs, and glass-and-steel skyscrapers built in full disregard for human rights – it feels like a “Drive Emirates” commercial. I dread the inevitable moment someone greenlights FIFA World Cup: The Movie, with Ronaldinho as the wise mentor.

Bardem’s character asks, rhetorically, after a particularly nasty crash: “Why are we doing this? Why don’t we just play tennis, or golf?” (The film’s answer runs along the lines of “I chose this life / There was nothing else / I chose this / Nothing else made sense.”) In another scene, Sonny assures us he’s not in it for the money, claiming he has “his own demons to battle.” Joshua leaves a club early, suddenly remembering he has a race the next day – a sobering return to reality. But come on – it’s hard to believe any of it, when they’re all decked out in team gear where Red Bull, Oracle, DHL and others coexist in perfect branded harmony.

F1 the Movie is now running in Romanian cinemas.

Dragoș Marin

+ posts

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.

This author does not have any more posts.

Dragoș Marin

+ posts

Dragoș Marin published articles and film reviews on filmreporter.ro and colaborated in various specialized festivals and TV shows. In everyday life he's a prokect manager while continuing to stay connected to pop culture and to write about what he has to say.

This author does not have any more posts.