F1 movie review: Brad Pitt Formula 1 is genuinely thrilling but deeply flawed

Ever since Brad Pitt rocked up to the Silverstone race track two years ago, the world has been waiting for the F1 movie.

With the filmmakers behind Top Gun: Maverick onboard (director Joseph Kosinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, screenwriter Ehren Kruger and cinematographer Claudio Miranda), it promised to be a lean-forward, adrenaline-pumping drama full of spectacle.

It is often that.

The racing sequences are phenomenal. The production shot on real-life F1 tracks during race weekends in the short windows between practice and qualifying, sometimes with Pitt and co-star Damson Idris, and sometimes with stunt crews.

The audience gets up-close and personal inside the cockpits of the Formula 2 cars the movie rebuilt with the Mercedes F1 team to function as close as possible to proper F1 cars.

You’re in there with Pitt, you’re on the track with Idris, and you’re watching the cars fight for position, slingshot themselves from another’s slipstream, go wheel-to-wheel in battles so close you could believe that anything could happen, just like in a real race.

It’s truly thrilling.

In terms of recreating a F1 race, the team have done it. But, you know, you could also watch a real F1 race 24 weekends of the year.

What the F1 movie needed to do so that it wasn’t just mimicry was frame the racing within a story filled with emotional stakes. In this lane, it is less successful.

Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former F1 driver who crashed out after a bad accident in the 1990s. He spent the next 10 years as a professional gambler before returning to the wheel in other competitions – any competition, actually, wherever there is an open seat, he is there.

In the film’s opening scenes, he’s just won 24 Hours of Daytona and is about to drive cross continent in his van, in which he lives, to Baja for another rally.

That’s when his friend and former teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem) shows up with an offer. Ruben is the owner of the APX team, who in two-and-a-half seasons has yet to score a single point (meaning they’ve never finished inside the top 10 in a grand prix), and if it finishes the season that way, the board will be able to sell it from under him.

Ruben wants Sonny to drive for the team, because despite his advanced years (there are lots of jokes about how old Sonny is but no one actually puts a number on it, by the by, Pitt is 61 years old), he’s fast.

Ruben also wants Sonny to mentor his rookie driver, Joshua (Idris), who has raw talent but is young and immature, often too concerned with off-track distractions such as social media followers, brand deals and his celebrity profile. Joshua is threatened by Sonny and the two tussle on-track and off.

There’s also Kate (Kerry Condon), the team’s technical director, the first woman to hold the job, and while she does get her own work-related arc, she serves as the love interest to Sonny, despite Condon being almost two decades younger than Pitt (but still 10 years older than the actor’s real-life girlfriend).

Peripheral characters include Tobias Menzies as a board member, Kim Bodnia as the APX team principal, Sarah Niles as Joshua’s mum, and actual F1 racers such as Lewis Hamilton (who is a producer on the film), Max Verstappen, Fernando Alonso and Mercedes principal and co-owner Toto Wolff all appear as themselves.

In terms of story suspense, you can see where it’s all going. Things work exactly as you think it will, and that’s fine. That’s the kind of movie F1 was always going to be.

But here where it really flails – there’s no depth to the characterisation. Sonny is never not just Pitt playing himself, and his whole personality boils down to “I only feel alive when I’m racing”, while the others are archetypes of the “have something to prove” mould.

The only character who feels multi-dimensional is Bardem’s Ruben, whose ambition and, it must be said, desperation, is shaded with genuine concern for a friend. That has a lot to do with Bardem’s sheer talent, more than it does with the script.

The dialogue is hokey, and the screenplay definitely isn’t going to be winning any awards, and at two-and-a-half hours, F1 is at least 30 minutes too long, as it bounces through so many grands prix.

For a non-racing fan, the amount of time spent on track might be too much, and they’ll have to work out the intricacies of things like tire strategy, pit lane dramas and the drag reduction system from context clues. Terminology like “the straight” and “box, box, box” gets thrown around without explanation, which is more authentic but takes some adjusting for F1 newbies.

But it’s a hard one to call because the racing is also the best part of the movie. That’s quite the conflict.

For Apple and its studio partners, F1 is a big commitment with a reported production budget north of $US200 million, but that might be before offsets from sponsorship deals sprayed all over the movie.

That’s the other thing, you’ll have to be comfortable with all the commercialisation in F1, just as it is in the real competition. There are barely any frames that don’t have a brand logo or 10. Then there’s also the fact that the film is, arguably, a giant ad for F1 itself.

As a competition, F1 now has much wider global appeal as the calendar expanded to take in new territories as the focus shifted beyond Europe. Oil-rich countries in the Middle East now comprise four stops on the circuit, and the US has three grands prix whereas 15 years ago there were none. Netflix’s Drive to Survive docuseries supercharged interest in the sport.

So, yes, F1 is super entertaining and mostly a bloody good time, it just comes with a lot of buts, caveats and howevers.

Rating: 3/5

F1 is in cinemas July 26