There’s a certain kind of summer movie that’s so revved and ready to go, so fuel-injected with flash and talent and star power, not to mention an irresistible subject, that before the movie is barely under way you can feel yourself getting excited about being excited. “F1” is one of those movies. It’s an epic professional auto-race drama that looks and moves like a Formula One vehicle: dizzyingly fast, a touch futuristic in its synthetic design, leaving all second thoughts in the dust. Going into “F1,” you want to feel the thrill, the energy, the vicarious rush, and on that score there’s no denying the movie delivers.
The opening sequence is killer. As the majestic bombast of “Whole Lotta Love” floods the soundtrack, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), who was once a rising Formula One star and is now a freelance has-been (but he’s still got the right stuff), stirs himself from a sleepy stupor, plunging his face into an ice bath and sauntering out of the cruddy van he lives in to walk a few steps over to the team pit stop of the 24-hour Daytona marathon race, which is already unfolding beneath a starry sky.
As he straps himself into the cockpit, which is so small it’s as if he were just another component in the car’s sophisticated system, he’s basically taking over the night shift. Sonny being Sonny, it’s his job to lead his team from some dismal spot in the back of the pack right up to first place. He does so, zipping and weaving, piloting the car like a rocket ship to hell. (Having taken the team into the lead spot, he says to another member, “Hey, lose the race, I’ll kill you.”)
The cinematic shot language of existential car racing is, of course, well established. It was launched half a century ago in “Grand Prix” (1966), which featured thrilling Formula One races through the European countryside, the camera hurtling forward at road’s-eye view, all of it surrounded by a stuffy bloated piece of late-studio-system claptrap. That visual technique was enhanced in “Le Mans” (1971), and in the greatest car-race movie of them all, though it wasn’t officially a car-race movie — the original “Mad Max.”
Joseph Kosinski, the director of “F1,” is the high-tech nostalgist who made “Top Gun: Maverick,” and he knows how to take that need-for-speed doom-saturated narcotic aesthetic and ratchet it up to maximum rock ‘n’ roll overdrive. The racing scenes in “F1” seize your gut and sear the eyeballs. The cars zoom around like sci-fi birds with metal plumage, and the music, by Hans Zimmer (who’s an old hand at this, having done the pump-you-up score for “Days of Thunder” in 1990), works on the audience the way Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s EDM throb score for “Challengers” did. We go into “F1” excited about being excited, and the film makes good on that. It’s nothing if not an adrenaline high.
Yet it’s a high that may leave you feeling a bit empty afterwards. The film’s title — the idea of calling it “F1” rather than “Formula One” — may on some level be cool, but it almost sounds like an attempt to wrangle viewers by convincing them it’s a “Fast and Furious” movie. It’s not. Yet “F1” is a Formula One movie that relies on overly familiar formulas to tell its story. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, with a script by Ehren Kruger, whose brand is reconstituting old tropes (in addition to being one of the three screenwriters of “Top Gun: Maverick,” he has credits that include such redux product as “Dumbo,” “Ghost in the Shell,” and three “Transformers” films), the movie tosses together the generic elements of what we once thought of as the all-surface Simpson/ Bruckheimer/Tony Scott rebel-with-a-rival-and-love-interest mythology.
Pitt’s Sonny was gunning to be a Formula One champion until his career was brought to a halt by a horrific crash. (Rather shockingly, the film uses documentary footage of the aftermath of Martin Donnelly’s 1990 crash during the Spanish Grand Prix to stand in for Sonny’s accident.) Sonny is over-the-hill now, but like Pitt himself he’s an aging but sexy, fit-as-a-fiddle version of the cocky lone-wolf rebel-cowboy hero. A nomad with three failed marriages and a reputation as a gambling junkie, Sonny still hires himself out for races, mostly for the fun of it.
Early on, he’s tracked down to Mexico by his old racing teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who is now the owner of the APXGP Formula One team, which is doing so badly it’s $350 million in the hole; he wants to bring Sonny on. The independent Sonny is allergic to being an entrenched team member, but this is his shot, after 30 years, to demonstrate that he’s still the best. So he agrees to come aboard and show the APXGP folks how it’s done.
Chief among them is Josh Pearce (Damson Idris), the team’s hotshot British rookie. He and Sonny will, of course, compete to the death, on and off the track, trying to outdo each other until they learn to work together, with the rivalry flavored, in this case, by the fact that Sonny is an “old man,” set in his ways. What the audience sees, however, is that it’s Sonny’s special blend of daredeviltry and discipline that wins races.
As Josh, Damson Idris summons a brash charisma in a facile and rather underwritten role, while Kerry Condon, from “The Banshees of Inisherin,” has a snappish appeal as Kate McKenna, APXGP’s technical director (the first woman to occupy such a position in the F1 world), who strikes up a combative flirtation with Sonny. You feel how hard the film is working to convince us that this is something more than the Obligatory Love Interest, but damned if it doesn’t play like just that. There’s a corporate drama hovering in the background (will APXGP be sold out from under Ruben?), which feels like another standard-issue spare part.
There have been very good auto-race dramas, like “Ford v Ferrari,” centered around conventional macho-rivalry plots. That “F1” flirts with cliché isn’t necessarily a problem; just look at how commandingly Pitt takes a character we’ve seen before and paints him with a fresh coat of rusty glamour. But what a movie like this one needs is for the drama to play out within the races themselves. That’s what happened in “Ford v Ferrari,” and in the aerial dogfights of “Top Gun” and “Top Gun: Maverick” (which were shot and edited with bedazzling precision), and in the car-race film that raised this sort of thing to the level of art — the staggeringly underrated “Ferrari.” But as “F1” sprawls across the Formula One World Championship, moving through the last nine Grand Prix contests of the season, the races generate a surface buzz, but the stories they’re telling are less than razor-sharp.
The movie is working so hard to be “immersive” that instead of ever explaining the ins and outs of racing to us (how long between pit stops, how the season works), it simply assumes we know the fine points. Kosinski, who filmed actual F1 contests, scores on atmosphere but stages the races in a way that’s fragmentary and at times confusing, without giving us a clear enough picture of how each driver is trying to maneuver. The loudspeaker commentators who narrate the races have to do too much of the work for us. By the time the film starts bringing in the factor of “soft tyres” (which are more effective but wear out instantly), and who’s got more tread on their wheels, we have to take it all on faith, because the film is telling us rather than showing us.
With the action confined to stadium racetracks, you wonder why Kosinski didn’t give the audience more of a consistent eagle’s-eye overview; that would have helped. But maybe he just counted on the thrill of speed, and the specter of death, to be the film’s engine. Is there a suck-in-your-breath cataclysmic crash? Of course there is, but we’re invited to exhale from its consequences too easily. In “Grand Prix,” someone asks why race drivers do what they do, and a racer’s girlfriend replies, “It’s marvelous to go very fast.” Yes it is, but that in itself isn’t enough to make a marvelous movie.
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