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Cosmopolitan
29 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- Cosmopolitan
The Ending of 'F1 The Movie', Explained
You've heard this story before: Person from [insert legitimate or criminal career] returns for one last go at [taking down a sworn enemy/entering the boxing ring/pulling off a heist] even though they're older and hardened and said they'd never do it again. Welcome to the genre, F1 the Movie. In the new summer blockbuster hopeful, Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a former Formula One driver who retired 30 years prior after suffering terrible injuries in a crash. He's convinced to return to racing on the team of his former friend and fellow ex-driver, Ruben (Javier Bardem). Sonny's teammate is an up-and-coming driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), and they're on the worst team in the league, APXGP. Will the newbie and the veteran be able to pull off a comeback, save the team from being dismantled by its board, and stop Ruben from being forced to sell it? Will Sonny change his legacy in the sport? Will Joshua make a name for himself? That's what audiences are there to find out. And, if they're F1 fans, they're also there to check out all the cameos from the real drivers and critique how accurate the film is to actual racing. If you've already seen F1 and want a bit more clarity on how things turned out, keep reading. If you think you might see F1 and don't want it spoiled, turn back now! We're about to get into how things shake out for Sonny, Joshua, and the APXGP team. With Sonny driving for APXGP, the team steadily works their way closer to the podium. This is despite Sonny doing a number of things that certainly wouldn't fly in real F1 Grands Prix and Sonny and Joshua not initially getting along. During the Las Vegas Grand Prix—the second to last race of the year—Sonny is injured and hospitalized, at which point Ruben finds out just how bad Sonny's injuries from 30 years earlier were. Like, he was nearly paralyzed and should have never raced again. So, Ruben fires him. After he's released from the hospital, Sonny is approached by APXGP board member Peter (Tobias Menzies), who reveals that he wants Ruben to be forced to sell the team so that he can start his own team, and he wants to bring Sonny on as the team principal. Peter also admits that he forged documents to try to get APXGP banned from racing by saying their car included illegal components. Anyway, just prior to the last race, Abu Dhabi, Sonny returns to the track and is all, "Hey Ruben, you better let me back on this team because... it's the last race, you have no better option." Okay, sure! He also texts Peter a middle finger emoji. In the race, Sonny pulls all of his questionable Sonny stuff again, setting up Joshua to win the race. But, with moments left, Joshua and Lewis Hamilton collide, leaving Sonny to take the lead and win the race. Kate (Kerry Condon) is the APXGP technical director and Sonny's love interest. At the end of the movie, Kate and Sonny say goodbye to one another—for now. Sonny has some business to take care off, which is just temporarily becoming a driver for a different type of race, because it is only through driving that he can seek true euphoria. So, Kate and Sonny are a... long-distance hookup situationship? Not so romantic, but this is about the love of driving cars, man! Joshua was really put through the wringer. He ended up with Sonny as his teammate halfway through the season, was bossed around by him, was hospitalized from a serious crash, missed three races, and returned and almost won the last race only for Sonny to end up winning it instead. In the end, though, he tells Sonny that it's cool that Sonny took this one, because he's "gonna win a million races." You go, JP! Movie shoulda been all about you! To sneaky board member Peter's dismay, it seems APXGP will continue on, because they were able to win one race and having a 60-year-old former racer be the one to win it was quite the sensation! Unclear! A big deal is made about Sonny winning the final race—I mean, the movie is about him, so that's fair, and some drivers never even win one Grand Prix—but we don't get to find out which of the actual drivers won the F1 season. Max Verstappen won the last four IRL, so him, I guess! Or maybe in this fictional movie Lewis Hamilton won the championship because, conveniently, he's a producer on the movie.
Irish Examiner
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Film review: The F1 movie is a fine vehicle for summer popcorn cinema
For a mega-budget summer blockbuster, F1: The Movie (PG) opens with a surprisingly modest ambition: Formula One team boss Ruben (Javier Bardem) wants his old pal Sonny (Brad Pitt) to come out of semi-retirement to help the struggling APX team win just one race. In fact, Ruben would be delighted with a podium place; and if the veteran maverick Sonny can mentor APX's promising driver Joshua (Damson Idris) along the way, helping the young tyro to channel his raw talent into a more mature, team-oriented approach, Ruben will let Sonny write his own cheque. There's only two problems. One, Sonny isn't in it for the money; two, Sonny's a throwback who can't be doing with all the fuss – rules, especially – that goes with competing in Formula One these days. Given the basic set-up, it's no surprise to learn that the writers – Ehren Kreuger and Joseph Kosinski, with Kosinski directing – recently combined on Top Gun: Maverick, but F1 has a charm of its own, much of it derived from Kerry Condon, who plays Kate, the no-nonsense APX technical director who takes it upon herself to puncture Sonny's ego at every opportunity, and in an accent that unapologetically strips the paint from the walls. In fact, most of the main characters are pretty likeable here: Javier Barden is artfully flighty as the smooth-talking Ruben, Damson Idris holds his own as the fearless but impetuous Joshua, and Brad Pitt is charmingly self-deprecating as the world-weary knight-errant Sonny, who is just about holding it all together for one last tilt at glory. The driving sequences are expertly done (the camerawork from inside the cars is either thrilling or terrifying, depending on how you feel about piloting rockets travelling at 350 km/h), and the fact that the movie is made in association with the FIA gives it verisimilitude – Sonny and Joshua are racing against Ferrari and Red Bull, Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. Is it plausible? Not really. Is it the best popcorn-friendly cinema of the summer so far? Most definitely. M3gan 2.0 M3gan 2.0 ★★★☆☆ Theatrical release The killer doll from M3gan (2022) returns in M3gan 2.0 (15A), although the stakes are considerably higher this time around: M3gan's basic programming has been enhanced to the point where she is now a top secret military asset, aka Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), an unkillable AI uber-weapon that immediately goes rogue and begins hunting down her creators as a precursor to annihilating the entire human race. Standing in Amelia's way are M3gan's creator Gemma (Allison Williams), Gemma's 12-year-old niece Cady (Violet McGraw), and the original M3gan (Amie McDonald), who is really, really sorry she tried to kill off Gemma the last time out. Written by Akela Cooper and Gerard Johnstone, with Johnstone directing, M3gan 2.0 is a sci-fi horror that leans into worst-case scenarios surrounding AI, piling on the absurdities and borrowing heavily from the Terminator movies (Amelia is basically the Terminator decked out like Veronica Lake). It's all very silly, of course, but it's also enjoyably mindless fun. The Road to Patagonia The Road to Patagonia ★★★★☆ Theatrical release The Road to Patagonia (PG) is a documentary by Australian ecologist, surfer and filmmaker Matty Hannon, who set out to motorcycle from the northern tip of Alaska all the way to South America's southernmost cape. Along the way he meets the Canadian urban farmer Heather, swaps their motorcycles for horses, and embraces a variety of 'nature-based cultures' that the couple encounter on their epic trek. There's an seductive naivety to the central theme of rejecting neo-capitalism's evils in favour of a slower life more in tune with natural rhythms, one that calls to mind the work of Robert Pirsig or Robert Macfarlane as Matty and Heather traverse mountains, deserts, jungles and shorelines on their rollercoaster trip toward enlightenment. The scenery is fabulous and the couple are good company on an feelgood odyssey that is as gritty as it is idyllic. (theatrical release)
Time Magazine
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Is a Perfect Brad Pitt Vehicle
There's a sturdy formula at work in Joseph Kosinki's hugely entertaining F1 The Movie, and it has nothing to do with the intricate Formula One racing regulations. The idea of the aging athlete, thief, or cowboy who has one last fill-in-the-blank left in him is at least as old as Sam Peckinpah's magnificently bloody—and deeply moving—1969 western The Wild Bunch, and probably older. You can argue that there's a double standard at work here: aging actresses usually get the far less glamorous, and far less proactive, fading starlet roles. Even so, there's something touching about a storyline that involves an aging guy making one final, desperate grab for that big bank job, that high-stakes bounty, that shiny, emblematic trophy. Their egos are just as big as ever, but their bodies are failing them in ways they never could have imagined at age 20. These types of roles are great consolation prizes for male actors as they age out of straightforward leading-man roles; sometimes they represent an actor's best work. To paraphrase an old and outlandishly sexist women's hair-color advertising slogan, Brad Pitt isn't getting older; he's getting better. In F1, he plays a scruffy, aging driver who trundles from town to town in a van kitted out with life's essentials—a bunk, a small bookcase, a pull-up bar—answering the call whenever anyone needs some random Joe to man a fast car. This is no way to make a living. As we watch him prepare for the movie's first race, a small-town affair where his takeaway amounts to just $5,000, he's a crazy wildflower bouquet of jangled nerves: he does a few desperate last-minute pull-ups, dunks his face in a tiny basin of ice water, and superstitiously slips a playing card into the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then he jumps into a car's cockpit, and wins. Pitt's character is Sonny Hayes, a perfect movie name for an almost-has-been if ever there were one. He takes his tiny check and drives off into the sunset—or, rather, to the laundromat, where an old friend and colleague, Javier Bardem's Ruben Cervantes, locates him after having searched for him for ages. Ruben tries to tempt Sonny into one last…well, you know. It turns out that Sonny was a racing phenomenon of the '90s, a surefire champion, before flaming out in a crash that nearly killed him. In the years since, he's just been a cool—yet stressed-out—guy tootling around anonymously from race to race. Sonny's old racing teammate Ruben is now the owner of a failing F1 racing team, APXGP—Apex for short—and though Sonny at first resists his friend's entreaties, he eventually succumbs, showing up for training in London wearing a rumpled shirt, with uncombed hair and a bag slung over his shoulder. In other words, he's cooler than anyone—even if, under the surface, he's also intensely stressed out. His future teammate, the rarin'-to-go hotshot Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), is unimpressed by gramps. He later tells his mother this new guy he's being forced to work with is 'really old, like 80.' These two are quite obviously going to clash, perhaps too many times. Kosinski recently directed another older-guy-gets-a-second-chance movie, 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, and the script he's working from here—which he cowrote with Ehren Kruger—keeps oldster Sonny and young punk Joshua sparring maybe a little too long. But all the intergenerational drama is really just an excuse for lots of fabulous driving. As an individual who has not been behind the wheel of a car since passing my driver's test in 1986, I somehow adore racing movies. At one point during F1, as I watched Sonny navigate the twists and turns of a track the way a violinist sails through a tricky movement, I scrawled in my notebook, 'It must feel like flying.' The metaphor is so stupidly obvious that it eventually becomes an F1 plot point, but no matter. The F1 Grands Prix races take place in glamorous locales around the world—Abu Dhabi, Monza, Las Vegas—and the organization allowed Kosinski and his cast and crew to film during the actual events, though only during downtime. That's part of what makes F1 feel so vital, and so fun. Idris and Pitt do their own driving as well, hitting speeds of up to 180 m.p.h. (Pro drivers can go as fast as 220 m.p.h.) If they make race-car driving look incredibly cool and awesome, they also capture how emotionally stressful it must be. The crashes depicted in the movie are unnervingly realistic, multisensory symphonies of screeching tires and seemingly unquenchable flames. No wonder Pitt's Sonny has so many superstitious rituals. F1 is a Jerry Bruckheimer production, with all the attendant glossy, noisy earmarks. (Though Bruckheimer is best known for producing action films like Con Air, Armageddon, and both Top Gun movies, it's worth noting that his oeuvre also includes pictures like Paul Schrader's Cat People, the political drama Veronica Guerin, and the soap-opera spoof Young Doctors in Love.) It also benefits from the involvement of people who know what they're doing: F1 racing champ Lewis Hamilton was an adviser and producer, and he also makes a cameo. There's also a fine array of actors here: Idris makes a fine cocky young upstart. As the first F1 woman tech director (sadly fictional), Kerry Condon is spikily charming. (She rides a bike to work—the team's training HQ is in the English countryside—explaining, 'My job is wind, so it helps to feel it.') But really, Pitt is the guy. His face has weatherbeaten savoir-faire; it's a map of mistakes and regrets. F1 also does not skimp on the mystique of racers' gear-and-stuff: the flameproof zip-up jumpsuits, the soft, flat-soled driving booties, the giant helmets that make their bodies look tiny, wiry, and sexy in comparison, Daft Punk-style. Racecar driving is alluring and glamorous, but Pitt's Sonny shows us another side, too: how a dream can come close to sapping the life out of you. You really need him to win that one last race. How many times have we seen this storytelling convention, and why don't we get sick of it? It all boils down to the actor, and how good he is at vibing with universal aging-guy feelings, including the realization that your grandest achievements may be behind you. Brad Pitt, at 61, has finally aged into roles like these. And sometimes, as F1 proves, they're the best thing that can happen to a guy.
The Independent
17-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Man United given bold deadline to win Premier League by CEO Omar Berrada
Manchester United chief executive Omar Berrada has doubled down on his bold target, saying the club will win the Premier League title by 2028. Berrada also put pressure on United's women's team by insisting they can claim their first ever Women's Super League title by the same date. Ex-Man City chief operations officer Berrada first told staff of his "Project 150" vision in September last year and acknowledges that the goals are audacious, given the current state of the club. Ruben Amorim 's men's side having just endured a worst top-flight season since relegation in 1973-74 as they finished 15th and, while the women's side came third in the WSL to seal Champions League qualification, the league has been won by a dominant Chelsea team for each of the last six years, with United 16 points behind the Blues this term. There are also off-pitch issues, with part-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe continuing his cost-cutting measures with a second round of redundancies as 200 jobs look set to be lost. 2028 marks 150 years since the club was founded as Newton Heath in 1878, hence the target, but Berrada insists double title success is realistic. In an interview with the United We Stand fanzine to be published on Wednesday, je said: 'It's establishing a series of targets within a timeframe so we can focus our efforts and energy on that goal. "Can the team win the Premier League title by 2028? Of course. We've just finished 15th and it seems an impossible task. But why not aim for it? Why not do everything in our power? 'I firmly believe we can do it. We have two or three summer windows to build a team to start competing to win the Premier League.' In addition to finishing third in the WSL, United's women's team also lost in the FA Cup final to all-conquering Chelsea, while the men's dismal Premier League finish was compounded by a loss in the Europa League final to Tottenham. And while Berrada was shocked by the men's poor season, he's adamant Amorim is the right man to turn things round. 'We knew that by bringing in Ruben mid-season that it was going to be even more difficult for the team to perform,' Berrada added. 'We saw it as an investment for the following seasons, because we were going to give Ruben time to get to know the squad, the club, the Premier League. 'We have a very clear roadmap. Had Ruben started on 1 July 2025, we wouldn't have been able to have all that knowledge, right? And that's what I feel about these seven or eight months that he's had in the Premier League and what he's suffered in the Premier League. And the team has suffered. It's really going to help us in the future. 'I couldn't have said that we were going to finish 15th. That was never the goal. I think we probably underestimated the time it would have required the team to adjust to the system. But we don't regret the decision because I'm convinced that we'll see this pay off next season.'
Irish Daily Mirror
17-06-2025
- Business
- Irish Daily Mirror
Manchester United CEO says club can win Premier League by 2028
Manchester United CEO Omar Berrada has reiterated his aims for the Red Devils, saying that the side can win the Premier League by 2028. It has been a particularly barren age for United supporters since the departure of Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013, with just five major trophies in that period. Berrada joined the club as one of Sir Jim Ratcliffe's first hires after INEOS took a stake in the club, joining from local rivals Manchester City in January of last year. INEOS, who now control footballing operations at the club, have come under scrutiny from fans and pundits alike, particularly for job cuts in and around the training ground. A dismal 15th place finish in the Premier League last season, in addition to the embarrassment being augmented by a Europa League final defeat to Spurs, did not aid matters. However Berrada has his sights firmly set on league success in the medium term. Speaking to the United We Stand fanzine, he said: "We've just finished 15th and [winning the league] seems like an impossible task. But why not aim for it? Why not do everything in our power? "I firmly believe that we can do it. We have two or three summer windows to build a team to start competing to win the Premier League and if we can achieve it before then, we'll all be happy — and so nobody's saying that we don't want to win it until then." United have got going on the squad-building already this summer, looking to add Brentford's Bryan Mbeumo to the signing of Matheus Cunha from Wolves for a £62.5 million fee. Berrada is in agreement with the rest of the board that 40-year-old boss Ruben Amorim, who was appointed in November, is the right man for the job, saying "We saw it as an investment for the following seasons, because we were going to give time to Ruben to get to know the squad, the club, the Premier League." "So by the time that we got to now, we'll have had all the discussions about what does the squad need, the two-to-three-year plan to get to a squad that's capable of winning the Premier League. "We have a very clear roadmap of how we're going to get there. Had Ruben started on July 1, 2025, we wouldn't have been able to have all that knowledge, right? "And that's what I feel these seven or eight months that he's had. He's suffered in the Premier League, and the team has suffered. That's why I feel that it's really going to help us in the future." It does feel like the good times are a long way back for Man United, but Berrada and Amorim are certainly striking a chord with United fans with their words off the pitch. It can only be so long, though, before they will need to back it up on the Old Trafford turf.
