After half a decade of hype Apple Films’ Brad Pitt-led, Joseph Kosinski-directed, Lewis Hamilton-produced racing epic with a horrible name, “F1 The Movie” has finally hit theaters. Was it worth the wait? I went to see the movie on opening night, as did a few of my Jalopnik colleagues, and I chose to experience the Hans Zimmer score and roaring engines as it was intended to be, in glorious Dolby Atmos sound. After having slept on it my biggest takeaway is that this film absolutely must be seen in a theater, and also it kinda sucks. Apple reportedly spent over half a billion dollars to deliver this movie over the finish line, making it one of the most expensive films in history, and at least some of that is visible on screen, but it’s so poorly written and the premise so unrealistic, it might as well be another superhero movie we’ll collectively forget about in a week’s time. There are some serious highs evident here, but the overall presentation left me angrier than I hoped I would be.
This is a spoiler-free zone, so I won’t be recounting the film’s plot in detail beyond what was already made clear in the trailers. Brad Pitt’s early-60s Sonny Hayes is a washed up onetime F1 wunderkind with a string of failed marriages and a gambling habit that left him bankrupt. After winning the Daytona 24 he’s courted by a former competitor-turned-team-owner, Javier Bardem’s Ruben, to come help him turn around his APX GP team by the end of the season. For some reason the F1 season is already more than half-over in January, and he’s only got nine races to get the job done or he has to sell the team. Pitt is paired with brash young rookie driver Josh Pearce (Damson Idris), and the pair come to loggerheads on-track and off. There’s a half-hearted romance sub-plot that should have been left on the cutting room floor, a few big crashes, and lots of cameos from important people in the F1 paddock.
The good
The first ten minutes of this movie are transcendent, as the only actually believable piece of the film. Sonny rolls out of van life bed, throws on a suit, and jumps in a Porsche 911 GT3 R to run a night stint at the 24 Hours of Daytona. I will admit that I was moved to tears seeing my favorite sport on the big screen and presented so beautifully. I’m sure most of the people going to this film around the world won’t be familiar with sports car endurance racing, so it’s a hell of a thing to see. It’s a bit unrealistic for this much action to happen fourteen hours into a 24-hour race, but it’s totally believable that a 61-year-old former F1 great would still be racing in sports cars. Ironically, Hayes is paired in the Porsche with an already-retired 43-year-old Patrick Long.
I already mentioned Zimmer’s score, but I’m going to mention it again here as something I loved. It’s bombastic and emotional, large and looming like his work in “Inception” but with faster, more manic, pacing. It really adds emotionality to the scene setting, and you don’t realize how constant it is until two nearly-silent scenes completely grip hold of you in your seat. My entire theater was pin-drop silent as the lack of music gave laser focus to the scene in question.
There is something about the glitz and glamor of F1 that lends itself so well to cinematic scale. If I could watch every F1 race on a screen this large, I absolutely would. It’s instantly clear that Kosinski knows how to shoot action. His work on “Top Gun: Maverick” should have already told you that. There are some incredibly intense shots that are held for a beat or two longer than most directors would, and most of the action is portrayed in a way that makes visual sense.
The bad
As great as Zimmer’s score is, I’m not sold on the poppy star-studded soundtrack, as Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, Tate McRae, and K-pop phenom Rosé give the film a sell-by date that won’t age well. The use of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” as a pump-up track before the British Grand Prix is, in a word, schlocky. In another word, unwelcome.
Brad Pitt is unfortunately miscast in this role. For one thing, he’s older than the oldest F1 driver in history by half a decade. Most racers lose the ability to handle an F1 car by their mid-30s, and only a few truly great drivers like Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso can hang on into their forties. Sixty is beyond the pale. Pitt has a little sauce left, but not enough for this enthusiastic a role. There are dozens of forty-something actors, with just as big of names, who could have pulled this off better. Pitt doesn’t have the verve and swagger that he once had in, say, 2001’s “Ocean’s 11” or 2009’s “Inglorious Basterds.” He’s got something, but not it.
The plot of this movie is not only derivative and contrived, it’s been done before. Oh, an old guy comes out of retirement to help a headstrong rookie find his footing and save a team on the brink of destruction? That’s pretty much exactly what happened in “Driven,” the 2001 Sylvester Stallone/Kip Pardue/Til Schweiger Champ Car movie (which was supposed to be based on Formula One, but the teams wouldn’t give Stallone the access he wanted). Is it a hot take that “F1 The Movie” is just “Driven” with ten times the budget? Maybe, but that’s what it is. For what it’s worth, “Driven” itself is derivative of the one truly great racing movie, 1966’s “Grand Prix.”
The flubs
As an F1 fan, I’m not sure who this movie is for. There’s too much technical detail included in the plot for non-F1 fans to really understand. Does a normie know what DRS is, or why soft/medium/hard tire strategy matters? Do they know how a red flag works versus a yellow flag or a safety car? And for those of us that do know how that stuff works, why did they get so much of it wrong?
There is a point at which Sonny Hayes drives the car with blurred vision following a crash, reminiscent of Max Verstappen’s “double vision” comments from 2021. It’s probably not great that the general public sees F1 as a sport that doesn’t care about driver safety and brain health.
There is a point at which Sonny Hayes intentionally hits other cars to bring out a yellow flag, and after the race he is congratulated by Fernando Alonso in the media pen. It’s probably not great that the general public sees F1 as a sport that doesn’t care about driver safety and using your car as a weapon. It’s probably not great that F1 fans are reminded of the time Fernando Alonso won the Singapore Grand Prix in 2008 when the team told teammate Nelson Piquet, Jr. to crash so the safety car would be deployed to save the Renault team’s race strategy. The climax of the film is inspired by the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which remains perhaps the biggest black mark on the sport in modern history.
Why does the leader of a Grand Prix have his DRS open with no lapped cars in front of him? Why is the F1 season already half over at the Daytona 24 in January? How does Sonny Hayes even get a drive in the car without a Superlicense? It absolutely doesn’t matter for the construction of the film, so why did the season go from Monza to Zandvoort, then fly across the Atlantic for Mexico, then back to Belgium for Spa-Francorchamps, then all the way back to Las Vegas, before jetting off to Abu Dhabi for the finale?
Conclusion
Okay, I’m definitely picking nits on some of this stuff, and a lot of it probably doesn’t matter for the film to be enjoyable. If you go into the cinema with a giant Coke and an even bigger popcorn, looking to have a good time, you’ll find one. “F1 The Movie” is loud and beautiful, bombastic and gorgeous even, but the merely serviceable acting, poor writing, and bad racing make it a cinema-only movie for me. If I’d waited until it was on Apple TV+, or it had gone straight to streaming, it would be an unambiguous stinker. This is all about the sound and vision, and I can’t see that translating to the small screen. Go buy your tickets and see it in a theater, or skip it altogether.
