F1: The Movie mixes ho-hum character development with some fist-pumping race action

National Post

3 days ago

Formula One racing is, depending on your vantage, either an exciting, adrenaline-fuelled sporting event that brings together humans and machines at the pinnacle of performance perfection or a bloody waste of time. F1: The Movie can be seen in the same way.
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Consider the second point of view. It's a race of some 300 kilometres — roughly the distance from Calgary to Edmonton, and featuring similar speeds as the more lunatic drivers on Highway 2. And yet where do you end up? Exactly where you began, minus several tires and a lot of high-octane gasoline. Talk about spinning your wheels.
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But get into it — and a lot of people do, through television and in person — and it can be a fist-pumping chase for glory as drivers battle to the finish line. And like any other sport it has its heroes, names like Schumacher, Senna and Lauda.
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To be fair, I only know those last two from the excellent Senna documentary and the biopic Rush with Daniel Bruhl and Chris Hemsworth. Which brings us back to F1: The Movie, which is fully fictional, with a script from Ehren Kruger and director Jospeh Kosinski, and production by Jerry Bruckheimer — the same team behind the equally spirited Top Gun: Maverick.
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Brad Pitt — almost identical in age to Top Gun's Tom Cruise — plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up driver with a bad crash in his past, and an almost zen-like devotion to the sport. He doesn't drive to win. He wins (or, more often, loses) to drive.
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But his old buddy Ruben (Javier Bardem, suave as ever) thinks Sonny has what it takes to carry his scrappy racing team to victory. And so, over the objections of most of his colleagues — including one who is the nearest thing the film has to a villain — he recruits Sonny for the season, pairing him with the much younger Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) in a mentor/mentee relationship that threatens to drive Joshua round the bend.
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At least Joshua's mom likes the look of Sonny, which I think is true of a lot of moms these days. The film sets up the two protagonists as standing on either side of a generation gap wider than six lanes of traffic. Joshua has a social media manager and worries about endorsements and his image. Sonny, whose loose, ambling gait evokes a sentient futon, couldn't care less about likes and hits.
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Joshua works out religiously, tracking his reps like a novitiate counting Hail Marys. Sonny runs on the same tracks where he races, presumably to get a feel for the road. He also has not one but two eccentricities: a pair of tennis balls he likes to toss around, and a deck of cards from which he draws before each race, pocketing the pick without peeking at it. Honestly, one of those quirks would suffice, much in the way that race cars don't need two spoilers.
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If you're starting to sense some by-the-book character development, you're not far off. We've seen this kind of macho matchup before, and Sonny's burgeoning romance with the team's female head technician (Kerry Condon) isn't so much a question of will-they-won't-they but they-will-but-when. Though given that the movie runs a staggering two hours and 36 minutes from bumper to bumper, that still provides some tension.