A Vroom With a View

When people call a movie “old fashioned” they typically don’t mean it as a compliment. If a movie is “old fashioned” that means it’s dated, out of touch, maybe even a little slow in the pacing department. F1 is old fashioned in the best ways. It’s a throwback to the sturdy blockbusters of the ’80s and ’90s, an era of big-budget filmmaking about visual splendor and fun movie stars rather than IP. And whatever its minor issues, F1 sure as hell ain’t slow.

The vaguely retro approach suits F1’s story about the value of endurance and hard-fought life experience over modern values and technology. Its hero, Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), once ruled the racing world, before a spectacular flameout on the F1 circuit. Decades removed from his heyday, Sonny ekes out a meager existence as a driver for hire. He helps a team win the 24 Hours of Daytona, immediately turns down an offer to stay with the team full-time, then heads out to California in his beat-up van hoping to find a spot in the Baja 1000.

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Sonny never gets there. Along the way, an old colleague named Ruben (an impossibly handsome Javier Bardem) finds him and makes him an offer he can’t refuse: A seat behind the wheel of an F1 car. Admittedly, Ruben’s APXGP is maybe the worst team in the sport, and he’s so deep in debt that if he doesn’t win one of the season’s last nine races, he’ll lose his company. That’s why he needs Sonny; not only to drive for APXGP, but also to mentor Ruben’s other driver Joshua (Damson Idris), who possesses a lot of talent and very little time on a real F1 track.

Sonny rejects Ruben’s pitch. But it’s clear he’s tempted by it. He asks a waitress at a roadside diner: What would she do if a friend made her an offer that seemed too good to be true? She asks him if the money he’s offering is good.

““It’s not about the money,” he replies.

“So what’s it about?” she asks back.

Sonny pauses and mulls that question over, then spends the rest of F1 trying to figure that out. This is admittedly an odd theme for a film that cost a reported $300 million (a number F1’s filmmakers dispute). Regardless of the budget, F1 feels like an opportunity for director Joseph Kosinski to apply the lessons he learned making the supremely entertaining Top Gun: Maverick to the world of open-wheel racing.

Most importantly, that means an approach to action that favors practical stunts and real driving captured in intimate, visceral close-ups by vehicle-mounted cameras traveling at breakneck speeds. In F1, Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda almost literally put you into the driver’s seat — and on the nose, and leaning over the wheels, and peeking out the side view mirrors — of an F1 car. The results are visually spectacular, and a significant step forward in terms of the presentation of racing on the big screen.

I’m not sure if the earthbound world of racing ever quite measures up to the high-stakes intrigue of aerial dogfighting or low-altitude bombing runs, and where the action in Top Gun: Maverick continually mixed things up with new angles and new twists (dogfights, G-force endurance trials, chases) a lot of F1 is just … driving. It’s incredibly well-executed driving, but it does feel a little less varied — especially over the course of a 156-minute movie. (That’s at least according to this F1 neophyte who knows next to nothing about Formula One racing, and who sometimes found the intricacies of the sports’ strategies and maneuvering a little tough to follow, even with various TV announcers providing play-by-play over the racing sequences.)

The other element that Top Gun: Maverick had that was essential to its success was the original Top Gun, which provided legacyquel plot threads like Maverick’s relationship with his old rival Iceman, along with a genuine emotional through line. Maverick didn’t just want to win or be the best, he desperately wanted to repair his relationship with his late wingman Goose’s son Rooster. Maverick is the rare sort of blockbuster that is genuinely thrilling and also might make you sob because of a single line of dialogue that one macho dude says to another macho dude.

F1 tries to bring a similar level of emotional weight to Sonny Hayes’ return to the world of Formula One, but it never quite gets there. Pitt looks great strutting around the APXGP pit in his perfectly rumpled racing suit, and tossing off the occasional surfer-dude-ish Zen koan (“Hope is not a strategy! Create your own breaks!”). And Idris is perfectly suited to the part of the cocky rookie who can’t stand this geezer telling him what do. (Brad Pitt is 61. 61!)

But their relationship never moves beyond the expected arc found in most sports movies about older, wiser vets coaching arrogant newcomers. (Pitt’s flirty relationship with his team’s technical director, played by Kerry Condon, supplies few surprises as well.) Instead of the dialogue scenes adding heft to the driving sequences, they sometimes play like the dry ESPN pre-game show before a can’t-miss live sporting event; you can’t fast-forward, so you’ve just got to sit there and wait for the good stuff.

The movie succeeds anyway on the basis of pure swagger; Pitt’s grin, Idris’ put-downs, and especially Kosinski’s assured direction of those incredible driving sequences. In Top Gun: Maverick, another film about an aging hotshot given one last chance at glory as the mentor to a new generation of stars, one line of dialogue got repeated like a mantra: “It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.”

F1 never quite says “It’s not the car, it’s the driver” — but it comes awfully close on several occasions. And it makes it clear that when it comes to action movies, it’s not the subject, it’s the director. That strikes me as a pretty old fashioned notion, and a good one.

RATING: 7/10