F1 the Movie: Brad Pitt’s racing drama aims for maximum adrenal thrills, minimal storytelling

“It’s not about the money” says Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), the Ayrton Senna-generation seat-of-the-pants driver brought back in this tech-bombardment of a film to race in the present day. A dozen or more corporate logos blazoned in front of our eyes throughout its 156 minutes would beg to differ. So would the news that Pitt himself will benefit from the film to the tune of an estimated $30 million. 

We know Hollywood is in trouble, but if F1’s branding blitz is a symptom of the movie business’s well-advertised problems of survival, it also offers a peculiarly soul-less way out: feed off new levels of finance through sponsorship and product placement borrowed from the most egregiously successful fossil-fuel burning sport. For veteran producer Jerry Bruckheimer to compete on the biggest screens with the likes of Top Gun Maverick (2022), it makes sense to milk a ready-made popular phenomenon and hire Maverick’s director Joseph Kosinski, who, along with Maverick screenwriter Ehren Kruger, will do his best to maximise the adrenal thrills and minimise the storytelling. 

Following in that high-octane spirit (one mined for years by the Fast & Furious franchise) I’ll swiftly relate the thin main story. When Sonny wins (with inferior co-drivers) the 24-hour Hours of Daytona race, Sonny’s old F1 team-mate Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem) urges him to return to F1 for APXGP, the team Rubén owns, whose board will close it if they fail to win one of the nine Grand Prixs left before the end of the season. APXGP has a ‘shit-box’ of a car, an arrogant self-regarding rookie driver in Brit Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) and a sharp-tongued technical director in Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon). By example, Sonny begins to chivvy everyone to raise their games, but he’s blamed when Pierce overtakes too soon and crashes, even though Sonny saves his life. How Sonny eventually redeems himself is through low means, as we shall see.  

The rest of the cast, some of whom make up the slightly ramshackle pit team, figure briefly, but they’re better off than Bridgerton actress Simone Ashley, whose speaking role was filmed and then omitted. According to Kosinski, “There were two or three storylines that ultimately didn’t make it into the final cut.” Some seconds-long glimmers of comradeship and romance that survive among minor characters no doubt count as storylines too, not that you’d notice.  

In a bruisingly tech-reliant film like this, where dialogue scenes are filmed mostly in atmosphere-free spaces – showrooms, race simulators, pristine cars, hotel suites, private hospitals and restaurant booths – any ‘big’ performance is liable to come across as ‘acting’. In their confrontations the eyebrow-active Redford minimalism of Pitt and the stone-faced deadpan glower of Idris work with these environments, but that means the burden of verbal expression – apart from a few Bardem-Pitt old-buddy moments – falls mostly on McKenna’s shoulders. Her vocal presence is the only one to rival the Sky Sports correspondents Martin Brundle and David Croft, whose race commentaries predominate to an extraordinary degree. She’s more ‘there’ than anyone but at times it seems like she’s working alone, on a different film. 

Since Kosinski’s main concern to keep us keyed-up in race mode, F1 acknowledges the ludicrousness of its own proposition – that a 62-year-old man with screws holding his spine together could compete in a Grand Prix. One of the film’s producers is the great Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton, whose current struggles at the age of 40 to stay at the top of the leaderboards somewhat undermine the basis of this story. F1 gets round this fairytale element by eulogising cheating. In race after race, Sonny advances the cause of the team by bending the rules beyond the breaking point, making sure that the race is never ‘fair’ – but then since in real life F1, ‘fair’ means that the team with the best car nearly always wins, maybe such ruthless chicanery (pun intended) doesn’t matter. The film is all about how a man well past his prime can effectively bully his way to a team victory. I wouldn’t call any element of F1 satirical, but you could argue that Pitt’s sly elevation is not too different from that employed by the President of his country. 

However, none of these observations can alter the fact that Formula 1 is a behemoth of a popular sport, one whose thrills this film strives hard to emulate and often succeeds in invoking. Besotted with the paraphernalia of televised Grand Prix races, F1 loves blurring after-images, retina-stabbing lights, decal numbers, logos, stats, on-screen charts, night skies full of endless fireworks and the polished gleam of stationary state-of-the-art racing cars. As full of hectoring and overkill as F1 is, its considerable success proves that, in monetary terms at least, this new synergetic alliance works.  

► F1 The Movie is in UK cinemas now.