Following the success of Top Gun: Maverick, the world's dads began to wonder if maybe they might next be gifted a similarly belated sequel to that other high octane Tom Cruise vehicle, Days of Thunder. Ironically, Maverick's director Joseph Kosinski has probably scuppered any chance of that happening, as his racing drama F1 is exactly the movie you imagine a Days of Thunder follow-up would be.
Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger borrow the Maverick template of a grizzled veteran being called in to mentor a volatile rookie. Brad Pitt takes the Cruise role of Sonny Hayes, a driver whose Formula One career ended just as it was beginning when he suffered a near fatal crash in the early '90s. In the decades since, Sonny has turned to gambling while still taking part in the lower divisions of the motorsports world. Living out of his van and refusing to accept trophies (he won't even touch one out of superstition), Sonny does it for the love of the sport, not any financial reward. Sonny doesn't like to follow the rules. You might say he's a...
When Sonny is approached by Ruben (Javier Bardem), once his teammate and now the owner of the worst team in Formula One, he initially turns down his offer to join his seemingly doomed team. But Sonny can't resist the lure of a second shot at the big time. Sonny's job isn't to win; Ruben's cars simply aren't good enough to compete with the top teams. His role is to help cocky young driver Joshua (Damson Idris) to win. Not the championship, but a single race. That might be enough to save Ruben's team.
In narrative terms, F1 doesn't take a single unexpected bend. We've been through all of its chicanes before. Sonny and Joshua's bickering is a repeat of the wise veteran vs fame-hungry whippersnapper duel of the under-rated Rocky V. The will-they-won't-they romantic friction between Pitt's instinctual racer and Kerry Condon's intellectual technical director Kate is essentially a rehash of Cruise and Kidman in Days of Thunder. The talk of the importance of seconds mirrors all the chatter regarding inches in Any Given Sunday. There are few surprises here. F1 puts the formula in Formula One, the stock in stock cars. But rather than being disappointing, it's reassuring. There's a comfort in clichés. If you want to be challenged, watch a European arthouse movie. If you want to see Brad Pitt go vroom vroom, you're covered here.
F1 plays in some ways like a companion piece to another Pitt-headlined sports movie. Like Moneyball, F1 is about making the most of what you have to gain an advantage on competitors whose financial resources you simply can't compete with. The few glimpses of originality here are those that see Sonny devise clever ways to game the system, pushing the rules of the sport as far as he can without technically cheating. Every other driver is faster than Sonny, but he's been around the track a lot more times. It's a fantasy aimed at bitter middle-aged men who think they can still outwit the youngsters. And as a bitter middle-aged man, I have to admit it worked.
After decades of trying to escape his pretty boy looks, Pitt has lately accepted that he's a movie star rather than a character actor. He's rarely been as much of a matinee idol as he is here, his 60 year-old face resembling that of a 40-year old Robert Redford. In Condon's performance as Kate, we see a character actor evolve into a movie star over the course of a single film. With Condon using her own Irish accent, the scenes of friction between Kate the cailín and Sonny the cowboy play like they're a modern day Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne.
Pitt and Condon overshadow what the film's backers are hoping will be the main draw - Formula One itself. Success on the track becomes secondary to success in the sack. The racing scenes are exciting, but there's nothing here that compares to the best sequences of Days of Thunder, and for all his journeyman reputation, Ron Howard brought more invention to the racing sequences of his Formula One drama Rush. Kosinski struggles to visually communicate the dynamics and geography of the sport, so we rely too heavily on audio commentary to figure out where Sonny is in relation to the rest of the field. But this isn't really a movie about winning; it's about the thrill of competing. F1 may not take pole position in the canon of racing movies, but it's probably worthy of a spot on the podium.
Directed by: Joseph Kosinski
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem, Tobias Menzies, Sarah Niles, Kim Bodnia
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