FI: THE MOVIE REVIEW
“An exciting and thoroughly entertaining summer movie that delivers a far more memorable cinematic experience than so many other movies of its ilk.”
I’m not going to bury the lede on this review: Joseph Kosinski’s F1: The Movie – his follow-up to 2022’s highly-touted blockbuster Oscar winner, Top Gun: Maverick – is a damn good movie, and it could very well end up being one of the best movies, not only of the summer but of the entire year.
Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former F1 racer who abandoned the sport after a horrifying crash thirty years earlier. Although he has returned to racing – he just won Daytona when we meet him – he decided to put his F1 dreams behind him, falling into a life of gambling and mostly losing. When his friend and former racing rival Ruben (Javier Bardem) shows up to ask Sonny to join his failing F1 team at APX-GP, Sonny takes the offer seriously. Once Sonny arrives at the racetrack, he’s immediately met with resistance by the team’s younger star racer, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). This begins an ongoing conflict that needs to be resolved soon, or they’ll have a difficult time working together as a team, and indeed, they do.
If you’ve seen the trailer for F1 enough times (as I have), you might presume you’ve already seen the movie, and you might be partially right, except that the movie goes into so many different directions, always building on its stakes rather than just allowing everything to go fully into expected places. Personally, I don’t know very much about Formula 1 racing, except for the obvious – you want to drive fast, you want to win, and you don’t want to crash and die.
There were so many other elements to the racing in F1 that I didn’t fully understand, but it’s obvious that Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger were going for the utmost in authenticity. It certainly helped having world-champion Lewis Hamilton as a producer and presumably an on-set consultant, in order to maintain that accuracy. Everything is believable, even when it gets to some of the nerdier nitty-gritty of the car design and how that plays into the racers’ ability to achieve victory.
Even with the success of Danica Patrick, racing movies like this one tend to be sausage fests, so it was nice that the filmmakers included three key female characters. Kerry Condon’s Kat could have been set up solely as a potential love interest for Sonny, but in fact, she’s the technical director for APX-GP, designing the cars being raced. There’s also Sarah Niles (“Ted Lasso”) as Joshua’s ever-present mother, who offers just enough warmth and humor to make her a joyful presence. There’s also a subplot involving a rare woman in the pit crew, which offers another side of how tough it is for women to play a role in this sport.
Still, it’s Brad Pitt front and center, showing he can deliver another cock-sure character with enough depth and finesse that Sonny is another protagonist on par with his characters in Moneyball and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. There’s a good reason why Pitt is considered one of the top A-list stars, something that’s evident in every single scene, but also that he’s a serious dramatic actor that brings so much to Sonny, you can never imagine any other actor playing the character.
Oddly, F1 is a movie that works without having a true antagonist. Despite Sonny and Joshua’s conflict, everyone seems to be working towards the same goal, other then Tobias Menzies as a sleazy corporate investor trying to sell the team and oust Ruben in the process. Still, that character is played with some degree of subtlety to how we’ve seen this type of role in past movies.
Clearly, the racing sequences are going to be what most people get out of F1, and those scenes are spectacular, with each one offering true stakes and excitement, and never being obvious what is going to happen. There are moments that will get a gasp from the viewer, but there are so many different kinds of moments, including a fun poker game between Sony, Joshua, and Kate, and other similar interactions.
With each movie, Kosinski elevates himself to a filmmaker, who should be ranked among America’s best, and that’s even more evident with F1 and the cast and crew he’s assembled along with his producers, most notably the legend, Jerry Bruckheimer. Because of this, there’s no scenario I can see where F1 isn’t in the Oscar conversation, particularly a few technical categories, with its Sound and Editing being so above and beyond, it could make the movie a frontrunner in both categories. As usual, Hans Zimmer’s score brings so much to every aspect of the film, from the exciting racing sequences to the quieter and more emotional moments. I’m constantly amazed when Zimmer returns with a score that’s just so different from his previous work, but equally as powerful and effective.
Oddly, one of my only real issues with F1 was regarding some of the needle drop choices. While I love Led Zeppelin and Queen, and their music works, their inclusion in the film’s soundtrack seems pretty obvious. I much preferred how Rosé’s “Messy” was used in one of the movie’s many moments that got the audience I saw the movie with cheering loudly. I wasn’t really a fan of that song before seeing how it was used in the movie.
Essentially, Joseph Kosinski has done it again, creating an exciting and thoroughly entertaining summer movie that delivers a far more memorable cinematic experience than so many other movies of its ilk. I’ll be shocked if this doesn’t make it into my top 10 for the year, since I’m already planning to see it a second and even a third time.
Rating: 9/10
F1 will open nationwide on Friday, January 27.
I just saw it last night. Any movie that starts right off with Brad Pitt and fast cars set to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” is already a winner in my book! Good write up, Ed.