F1 Movie Review: Exactly What You’d Expect

So, what did I expect, you ask? Well, I expected beautiful shots of race cars doing race-car things, a thin story, product placement galore, and a movie that cheerleads both racing in general and Formula One specifically.

Only two things surprised me: The dialogue, particularly witty banter between characters, was better than I expected. That, and the presence of Javier Bardem.

That’s not a spoiler — Bardem plays Ruben Cervantes, the owner of the F1 team, Apex GT, that recruits Pitt’s aging racer, Sonny Hayes. So we see Bardem within the first five minutes and he’s playing a major character. Yet the marketing for this movie has focused solely on Pitt and Damson Idris, who plays hotshot young driver Joshua Pearce. Kerry Condon, who has a key role as Apex GT’s tech director, also has gotten short shrift in the marketing, and while she’s not an A-lister, she’s not exactly an unknown, either.

Bardem is pretty good here — although I still think of his creepy, evil drug dealer in 2004’s Collateral when I think of him.

Before I dig into the rest, here’s the story: Sonny Hayes was an up-and-coming young American F1 driver in the 1990s, and he was able to hang with Michael Schumacher and the late Ayrton Senna, though he suffered a severe crash before he could win a race. He then disappeared from racing before coming back and racing in various series, but never again in F1.

Meanwhile, Pearce is a talented rookie who gets a bit too distracted by off-track activities, blames his engineers instead of himself for any problems, and doesn’t work as hard as he probably should.

Cervantes, an ex-driver and good friend of Sonny’s, tracks down the nomadic Hayes — he literally lives in a van, no idea if he parks it down by the river — and recruits him to join Apex GT. Not to win, Ruben says, but to mentor Pearce. Cervantes may own the team, but the board can force a sale if Apex doesn’t get one win — oh, and the season is about halfway over.

From there, you can guess where it goes — the two drivers clash before bonding, the team improves before seeing setbacks, then the team recovers from adversity, there are major crashes and hospitalizations, there are speeches about how great racing is, et cetera.

F1 is directed by Joseph Kosinski, who also helmed Top Gun: Maverick, the successful sequel to the original Top Gun. It’s also produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who produced Top Gun and the 1990 NASCAR flick Days Of Thunder. Top Gun: Maverick screenwriter Ehren Kruger has the same role here.

So, given the involvement of those folks, you might expect F1 is another “Top Gun on wheels” — a shot that was also directed at Days of Thunder. That’s especially true given that, like Maverick, F1 has a plot involving an aging, talented mentor with self-destructive tendencies working with a cocky, young talent who needs to address self-destructive tendencies of their own in order to unlock their full potential.

So yeah, the Top Gun comparisons make sense — but I’d go cross-sport, too. We have the old guy teaching the young how to work harder and the young guy teaching the old guy how to use new tech — maybe it’s Bull Durham on wheels.

There is good here. The best reasons to see this movie is to see and hear the racing scenes — they are beautifully shot, and the soundtrack is solid. As noted above, the dialogue is good enough to lead to laughs, although some of the more serious stuff gets corny. And as much as product placement is annoying, well, watching real-life races is also a constant exercise in advertising bombardment.

The bad, other than the thin story, is predictability. It’s clear from moment one that Hayes and a certain character will end up in bed together. It’s clear that good things will happen to Apex GT, thanks to Sonny. About the only thing I didn’t see coming was a subplot concerning some underhanded behavior by a board member. Oh, and the specifics of the ending left me guessing right up until the last lap, but the general tone/direction was clear.

When it comes to racing terminology, the movie seems to get basics right — conversations about understeer and oversteer and tire wear and F1’s drag-reduction system all rang true. I don’t follow F1 closely enough to nitpick, but I was heartened that we didn’t see some Fast and Furious BS where a driver shifted a six-speed manual 10 times in a quarter mile. We also, for better and worse, didn’t get cheesy or condescending explanations of racing terms. On one hand, that’s good — the Days of Thunder scene where Tom Cruise uses sugar packets and Nicole Kidman’s legs to explain drafting is mega cringe — but on the other, it will force non-racing fans who get hooked on the sport due to the movie to do some Googling.

Still, F1 fans will find lots of Easter eggs — just about every current driver is named and/or seen, and off-track figures like Leigh Diffey, Will Buxton, Martin Brundle, Zak Brown, and Toto Wolff are also seen and/or heard. Brown and Wolff get lines in the movie, and McLaren’s instantly recognizable HQ stands in as the home of Apex GT. The film also captures the vibe of an F1 race — at least from what I’ve seen on TV, I’ve not attended one as a fan or media — pretty well.

There’s a decent amount of racing realism here — perhaps the most unrealistic part is that F1 racing is competitive. Zing!

Perhaps my biggest beef, when it comes to Hollywood versus reality, is the background we’re given on Sonny Hayes. We’re told he’s a “never was”, but in real life any driver who hung with Sienna and Schumacher before being derailed by a near-fatal crash would be a much more sympathetic figure. Not only that, but we’re also told that when Hayes returned to racing, he had stints in every major series, including NASCAR. Heck, the movie opens with him being on a team that wins the 24 Hours of Daytona.

A driver who had a multi-decade career with success at just about every level, one who was still winning Daytona while entering his sixth decade of life, would be in line for the Motorsports Hall of Fame even without an F1 win. I understand that the writers were trying to explain why someone as talented as Sonny had never won in F1, and why he disappeared from the scene, but it might have worked better if, instead of battling the demons of a scary crash, Sonny had simply fallen short because he was a degenerate gambler.

Speaking of that crash, aside from some dream-sequence flashbacks and a couple of conversations, the movie never fully delves into the effect that it had on Sonny’s confidence.

I also found the development of Sonny and Joshua’s relationship from rivals to friends to be too short and too easy.

F1 is the type of summer blockbuster I grew up with in the ’80s and ’90s — beautiful action scenes, breezy dialogue, a story hung together with duct tape. The plot is coherent enough to work but can crumble a bit if you start to think critically, or if you have a deeper than surface level understanding of the subject matter.

As far as racing movies go, F1 can’t hang with Rush or Ford vs. Ferrari. Both those have the advantage of being based on true stories, and true stories are sometimes better than anything a screenwriter can dream up. F1 reminds me more of Days of Thunder — great racing scenes, fun dialogue, a wafer-thin story that fails to develop the background of our talented yet flawed protagonist. It’s enjoyable, but it never really gets at the heart of why so many people love to drive/wrench on/build/watch race cars.

If you can stomach sacrificing story for spectacle, your $15-20 plus concessions will be money well spent. If you want something deeper, particularly when it comes to the love of a sport so dangerous that it can kill, stream Grand Prix or one of the aforementioned racing movies from the 2010s.