Decades ago, after the first Top Gun proved to the world that Tom Cruise was ready to take the Movie King crown, its success was followed up a few years later by Days of Thunder, where the premise was basically ‘what if Top Gun, but in very fast cars?’ Now, a few years after Top Gun Maverick, that film’s director Joseph Kosinski is basically following the same path (albeit sans Cruise) with F1. Taking his cameras-in-the-cockpits concept from Maverick and moving them into terrifying top-of-the-line racecars, Kosinski maybe loses a little of the thrill and heart of the 2022 masterpiece, but still delivers what is sure to be one of the most purely fun films of the summer.
Again like Maverick, F1 is a tale of old meets new. In the old corner is Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt in his Brad Pitt-iest role since Cliff Booth), a superstar in the ‘90s left behind after a catastrophic crash relegated him to lower-tier racing but now brought back as a last-ditch attempt to save the ailing ‘Apex’ F1 team owned by his old friend Ruben (Javier Bardem). In the new is Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the young and talented but untested current lead driver for Apex, instantly resentful of Sonny and the media circus he brings with him.
Together, they must (of course) learn to work together, each taking lessons from the other, in order to save the team from bankruptcy by winning one final race. Writer Ehren Kruger’s story is pure Sports Movie 101, holding very few surprises and some stretches of generic dialogue, but unpredictability is not the point here. Pitt and Idris are both charismatic leads, ably supported by Bardem and Kerry Condon as lead mechanic Kate (who actually acts everyone else off the screen in a performance that is maybe better than this script deserves), and F1 is all about getting them on the track.
When the cars are roaring down the raceways, F1 sings exactly like you hope it would. Kosinski doesn’t quite lean in to the bone-chilling terror and lethal stakes of these machines like Michael Mann’s Ferrari did, instead deriving more family (and sponsor) friendly thrills that are simply undeniable on the big screen. The first proper F1 race after some NASCAR and training runs is the first time Kosinski fully strips out the otherwise rather omnipresent soundtrack to just let the scream of engines moving at 300kmh fill the cinema and it’s just instant full immersion, while the climactic race is just old-school tension and excitement done exactly right.
For me at least, cars are less exciting than planes, and F1’s script simply can’t touch Maverick’s, so it does just about stay in the shadow of its spiritual predecessor. Then again, so does every major studio tentpole release since May 2022, so Kosinski can’t hardly be faulted for being a victim of his own success. F1 is good, dumb, technically and technologically immaculate fun that will turn even the most F1-unaware audience members (i.e. me) into petrolheads for its chunky-yet-rapid two-and-half-hour runtime.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 