Pitt, Stop: Why Brad's slick F1 flick is a drag

NZ Herald

15 hours ago

Racer man: Even Brad Pitt can't lift F1: The Movie above the ordinary. Photo / Supplied
NZ Listener Arts & Entertainment Editor Russell Baillie has worked at the Listener since 2017 and was previously the editor of the NZ Herald's TimeOut section.
F1: The Movie, directed by Joseph Kosinki, is out now.
There are big hopes of this doing what Top Gun: Maverick did for the cinema box office in 2022. After all, it's by the same director, and it features an elegantly ageing Hollywood megastar with a winning grin beneath his helmet visor. It also puts him in the cockpit of a fast-moving vehicle and takes us along for the ride. Woo, and indeed, hoo.
But Maverick had a couple of decades of fan worship for the original to build on and, well, Tom Cruise. F1: The Movie has 61-year-old Brad Pitt as a race car driver, who, 30-or-so years ago, was Formula 1's Next Big Thing. Recruited into a failing F1 team by an old co-driver and desperate owner played by Javier Bardem, Pitt's Sonny Hayes gets one last chance at glory. That's despite his age – the last F1 driver over the age of 50 was in 1955 – and frankly, his nationality. While doing that, he gets to be not only an unrequited adrenalin junkie but a wise mentor and strategist, just like Cruise's Maverick.
But if the story chassis is similar to Top Gun and from many of the same writers, unlike TG:M, F1 never really takes off. Neither does Pitt's performance. And while his fictional F1 team has plenty of whizz-bang tech, its workshop has only a 1D printer for supporting characters.
Much of F1 is filmed on tracks during actual F1 seasons in 2023 and 2024, and it's an adequate car-race movie of moderate excitement, but one where it's not clear just who our heroes are trying to beat or why. There are some race team politics involving Bardem's character and Tobias Menzies' board member, but mostly this is a very simple, predictable movie. F1 champ Lewis Hamilton, also a producer who gets a very brief cameo, has described it 'as the most authentic car-racing movie ever made'. Which rather damns a lot of far better car-racing movies and many terrific documentaries about far more colourful F1 drivers.
Authentic F1: The Movie may be, but it assumes its audience has never seen F1 before, with an incessant scripted commentary by actual commentators breathlessly explaining things. Helpful things such as being in last place are not ideal. The faux broadcast just shrinks the film to sports television ordinariness, or movie-of-video game contrivance. Though the commentators do offer deep insights about tyres and well, no, mostly tyres. No one leaving F1: The Movie will leave the cinema without a deeper appreciation of where the F1 rubber meets the road.
But there's not much else in F1: TM that delivers anything memorable or convincing. Not Pitt's raffish turn as the couldabeen champ who still lives to race but doesn't care in what or for whom. Not his mix of Obi-Wan oversight of, and rivalry with, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), his young, gifted and black English team mate, who seems based on a young Lewis. And not his fling with the ah, driven, team technical director played by Irish actress Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin). Her sexy boffin romantic interest owes much to the Nicole Kidman character in Days of Thunder, the 1990 Cruise race movie which, like this, was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.
Still, as the film and its many product placements whizz by, you do have to admire the corporate synergy of it all. The movie is backed by Apple TV+, a streamer vying for future F1 rights. The F1 business, surely the world's least sustainable sports league, will be happy with its US$200 million commercial, every slick but fairly dull, US market-aimed 156 minutes of it. It does have its moments, usually involving Pitt's Hayes making a brilliant tactical move verging on cheating. Afterwards, repeatedly, the track-cleaning crew comes out to clear the debris and sweep up the sports movie clichés that keep getting stuck in those tyres.
Rating out of five: ★★½