'F1' is a Great, Two-Hour Trailer for 'F1'
Brad Pitt's racing movie is a greasy corndog: exactly what you'd expect and nothing more.
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Since beginning his career with the forgettable Tron: Legacy in 2010, Joseph Kosinski has gradually become one of the hardest-working directors in Hollywood. After Tron: Legacy, he directed the vastly underrated dystopian sci-fi film, Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise, in 2013. Four years after that, he went on to direct the much-better-than-it-should’ve-been firefighter-sploitation film, Only the Brave, starring Miles Teller and Josh Brolin (which I’m convinced would’ve killed under its original title, Granite Mountain Hotshots).
After all those mixed and middling successes, both artistically and commercially, Kosinski levelled up in 2022 with the smash hit Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick. That, in turn, led to the similarly successful overdue sequel Twisters, in 2024. Everyone conveniently forgot his other 2022 feature, Spiderhead, an Ex Machina wannabe starring Miles Teller and Chris Hemsworth so forgettable that I had to Google the review to remember that I saw it myself.
Through it all, Kosinski has become one of those reliably commercial directors whose movies always look fantastic even if they’re dumb, with a quality-level that seems to fluctuate based on how good the idea was in the first place (James Mangold and Doug Liman also come to mind). As I wrote in 2022, he always seems like he’s just on the cusp of a true masterpiece.
In F1, Kosinski gets an Ehren Kruger script with Brad Pitt attached, the full support of F1 racing (along with one of its biggest stars, Lewis Hamilton, producing), and $200 million. With a marketing campaign driven by images of Brad Pitt in a tight little white racing suit looking like a golden god, rarely has a premise so succesfully looked like a blockbuster, before even seeing a frame.
Maybe that was the problem all along; the promise too big, a scenario that “practically writes itself” nonetheless having to submit itself to the tedious process of actually being written. The resulting film is more of what I like to call a corndog: exactly what you ordered and basically nothing more. It’s like they got so caught up in selling it that they just never stopped.
With a movie like F1® The Movie (yes, that is the official title, registered symbol and all, according to my official promo emails) everyone knows what the financiers want you to make: a big, flashy commercial for F1® racing that capitalizes on the popularity of the sport at the box office, and a hit movie that makes the sport look great onscreen. Lewis Hamilton fans + Brad Pitt fans = corporate synergy! And it’s the kind of callow commercialism that’s easy to get behind, because who doesn’t like watching fast cars go vroom?
If that’s the commerce, the art is figuring out how to put something else in there, something real, that you care about. Taking such a slam dunk concept and adding a personal touch is the kind of acceptable bait-and-switch that the best IP-driven films (Top Gun: Maverick among them) manage to pull off. Only with F1, it’s hard to figure out what that something someone cared about is, or whether it’s even there at all. And so it’s mostly just a collection of flashy cars, propulsive music, and pretty faces, that’s always easy to watch but never more than the sum of its parts.
Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former racing prodigy who now just goes where the wind blows, a driver-for-hire who in the film’s first sequence wins the 24 Hours of Daytona (I’m given to understand it’s one of car racing’s major holidays, like Honda Days or Toyotathon). Sonny walks off while the corks pop and the trophy gets passed around for photo ops behind him, hopping into his surfer van, off to go race some other car somewhere else, no matter how much his crew chief (the sadly underused Shea Wigham) wants him to stick around.
Sonny is a cowboy, see, a poker player, a real ramblin’ man — a joker who never drives without a lucky card in his pocket but eschews all the smoking and toking for daily jogs and morning pull-ups. You know that book DiCaprio’s character is reading in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? The Ballad of Easy Breezy?
That’s Sonny Hayes. Easy Breezy if he drove racecars instead of breaking broncos; Rick Dalton meets Cole Trickle. If I’m going overboard with the analogies here, it’s because F1 is long on explaining what type of guy Sonny Hayes is and pretty short on… well, everything else.
Eventually Sonny’s old acquaintance Ruben (Javier Bardem) shows up with an offer Sonny can’t refuse: to come be the world’s oldest F1 driver for Ruben’s deeply indebted racing team while mentoring their struggling young hotshot, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Sonny is torn, for some reason. “What would you do if a close friend of yours made you an offer that was 100% positively too good to be true?” he asks a diner waitress.
Like a lot of lines in F1, it sort of passes the basic smell test of “good movie line,” but falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Later in the film, Sonny explains to his team, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” an aphorism repeated several times like an incantation.
Google tells me that this line is something of a famous motto (a US special ops philosophy, according to the McChrystal Group), but I can’t really make heads or tails of it. It feels like a nonsensical, rise-and-grind LinkedIn dipshit’s answer to the old boxing adage, “timing beats speed, precision beats power.” That one makes sense, and doesn’t ignore the transitive property.