Lights out! A review of 'F1: The Movie'

The movie jumps into its formation lap with a thrilling vignette setting up lead character Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) as he takes a driving shift in the 24 Daytona endurance race. As the name suggests, it is an exhausting 24-hour race shared by three drivers. A few minutes of screentime in the introduction quickly sets up Sonny’s personality and his aggressive, put-all-your-cards-on-the-table racing skills.

From there, the first of three sectors commences when an old racing friend of his approaches him with a proposition. Ruben (Javier Bardem hamming it up deliciously), a former Formula 1 driving rival to Sonny, now owns his own racing team called Apex Grand Prix. Ruben is struggling in his first season in this league of billionaires. He asks Sonny to return to F1 as a driver to help save Apex from insolvency.

In a league where currently the average age of its lead drivers is around 27 years old, Hayes, at 61, is an outlier, if not a black swan. It’d be akin to Michael Jordan coming back next season to the Association for another playoff run.

To complicate matters, Apex’s current lead driver is the young, talented, brash Joshua Pearce, who doesn’t take too kindly to Hayes’s arrival. The Gen-Z Pearce predictably clashes with the grizzled boomer Hayes. The friction between the two is a highlight, as Pitt has great chemistry with actor Damson Idris (“Snowfall”), in a star-making turn as the rookie driver.

Kerry Condon (“Banshees of Inisherin”) shows up as Apex’s brilliant technical director, the first woman in F1 to hold that position. It is absolutely no spoiler to say that she would not be the first or last person in a movie to fall for a Brad Pitt character. As romantic interests go, Condon is charming and definitely outdrives the role that has been written for her.

Pitt is the perfect lead for “F1.” His experiences in other top dad movies such as “Moneyball” and “Fury” comes in handy. He mixes his still-boyish good looks with a lot of aged gravitas stemming from the weight of his past, full of botched pit stops, dirty air, wheel-to-wheel incidents and many red flags. (I’m not referring to racing here.) Pitt has enough real-life parallels to make this even more authentic.

There’s quite an impressive paddock of producers in this effort including action legend Jerry Bruckheimer, composer Hans Zimmer, cinematographer Franco Miranda, plus a massive team of production designers, art directors, engineers, stunt performers and visual effects renderers. Using that sweet, sweet Apple Studios money (reportedly around $300 million), they power through each straightaway and chicane flawlessly.

Their race strategy is top notch. A script by Kosinski as well as Ehren Kruger (“Top Gun: Maverick,” and also a superb older feature, “Arlington Road”) is pure dad movie pleasure. Yes, it is full of cliches and corny dialogue, but like the perfect dad joke, it’s perfectly manipulative to maximize performance. After all, current track conditions and weather patterns in the film industry call for simpler tales of heroes and their redemption arcs. Moviegoing, more than ever, needs box office podium finishes, as they face the headwinds of streaming, gaming and social media short form videos catering to minuscule attention spans. The dad movie is the industry’s DRS (Drag Reduction System).

For folks who love the globetrotting aspect of big screen motion pictures where the story takes them to exotic locations, “F1” is the perfect travel agent, providing on-location scenes filmed in central England, northern Italy, rural Belgium, coastal Japan, Vegas (baby!) and the geographic marvel and aberration that is the man-made Yas Island in Abu Dhabi.

This is just one part of the sexy appeal of F1 as a sport. It’s often less about competition and more about the status component including bespoke fashion, gourmet dining and drinking, exclusive entertainment and prized memorabilia, much like modern day hip-hop is less about the music and more about the lifestyle.

Formula 1 has had a long, storied history in sport racing. However, most fans in the U.S. have only recently been indoctrinated into it via the Netflix document “Drive to Survive,” which really blew up during the COVID lockdowns. This smash hit series (Think “American Housewives,” but with cars that go 230 miles an hour), became a gateway drug for U.S. sports fans, leading to the addition of two New World races, Miami and Vegas, onto the circuit.

“F1: The Movie” is a perfect offering to these new enthusiasts. True aficionados of the sport will find the details quite preposterous (except perhaps the visceral thrills). So you might say while it has some checkered authenticity as a fictional Hollywood tale, it still deserves the flag of that color, at least for the cargo shorts contingent.