‘F1’ movie assessment: Brad Pitt’s vapid vroom with a view

I’ve sat via sufficient summer time films to know when one’s attempting to indicate off, and F1 doesn’t even fake to play it cool. It kicks issues off with a package deal stuffed with revving engines, shiny chrome, and the promise of a massive, sweaty comeback, earlier than you’ve even had a crack at your popcorn. It’s acquired Brad Pitt behind the wheel, doing his finest weathered insurgent factor as a former racing star who’s spent the previous few a long time drifting between racetracks and poor life decisions, and truthfully appears sort of into it.

The movie kicks off with Pitt suiting up and sliding into a race automobile like he’s carried out it each morning since beginning, the digital camera swooping round him like a music video. The tires scream, Led Zeppelin blares, and for a temporary, wonderful second, you’ll most likely imagine, cinema is so again.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski — who, contemporary off Top Gun: Maverick, clearly nonetheless has a factor for fast-moving automobiles and delightful, semi-naked males — F1 is slick, thundering, and brings the identical sensory maximalism to the tarmac from the 2022 summer time sensation. The realism is intoxicating, nearly suffocating. You can odor the burning rubber and listen to the hiss of tire adjustments, however what you not often catch is narrative traction. It needs you to really feel issues, like awe and nostalgia and a few sort of rugged manly craving about glory days and second possibilities. But it’s principally simply a very expensive-looking option to watch vehicles go actually, actually quick.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in a nonetheless from ‘F1’
| Photo Credit:
Apple Original Films

Pitt’s laconic ex-champ Sonny Hayes will get lured out of semi-retirement to mentor cocky hotshot Joshua Pearce (performed by a swaggering Damson Idris) and assist rescue a floundering workforce from full irrelevance. There’s flirtations with a token love curiosity (Kerry Condon’s underwritten however gamely performed engineer), a gruff workforce proprietor (Javier Bardem, doing Bardem issues), and a handful of pit crew simply obscure sufficient to maintain from getting in the best way. You’ve seen this story earlier than — in Ford v Ferrari, Rush, Days of Thunder, Speed Racer, and about a dozen sports activities films that swear they’re about extra than simply the sport — simply by no means on IMAX with Dolby Atmos.

Sure, the racing sequences look improbable. Kosinski movies them with a loving depth that makes you’re feeling such as you’re proper there within the cockpit, particularly throughout these uncommon moments when the movie stops reducing each half-second and allows you to take within the velocity. You really feel immersed within the stress, the hazard, the great thing about threading a automobile at 250 miles an hour, and all this footage is actually spectacular in its ostentation; however the technical brilliance of those sequences quickly begin to blur collectively. Ironically, regardless of filming at precise Grand Prix’s and embedding its actors deep within the F1 world, Kosinski’s movie finally ends up feeling curiously distant.

After a whereas, it’s arduous to inform one monitor from the following, or why this lap issues greater than the final. The races don’t construct on something of worth a lot as repeat the components with expository commentary layered on thick. Every race is narrated like a spotlight reel for the F1 noobs, flattening the stress with intrusive play-by-play (“Sonny’s in last place! That’s not great for APXGP!”— thanks, disembodied voice of the apparent, I’ve eyes.)

Ehren Kruger’s script feels pressure-tested in a wind tunnel till any semblance of nuance blew clear off. Everyone talks like they’re in a Nike advert. At one level, somebody really says, “Sometimes when you lose, you win,” which, spoiler: means completely nothing.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in a nonetheless from ‘F1’
| Photo Credit:
Apple Original Films

The factor is that F1 isn’t really boring. It’s loud and enjoyable, in that ‘I-can’t-hear-my-own-thoughts’ sort of method. It’s shiny and assured and clearly constructed by individuals who know learn how to placed on a present. If you simply need to watch attractive vehicles go quick whereas Brad Pitt smolders underneath a racing helmet, you’ll get precisely that. The IMAX sound design virtually does CPR in your ribcage, Hans Zimmer’s synthy Challengers-like basslines kick like caffeine, and also you’ll get swept up within the immersion, even when your mind checks out. 

What’s irritating is that it might’ve been so way more. This factor had every thing — entry to actual F1 races, cameos from precise drivers, a price range large enough to pave a second Monaco — and by some means, it nonetheless feels prefer it’s operating on fumes.

Still, for all of the wheelspin, F1 isn’t a whole crash. It simply actually needs to dazzle and ship on the summer time blockbuster promise like Maverick, and for a whereas, that ambition is enjoyable to look at. You catch flashes of one thing richer in Pitt’s simple gravitas, Idris’s charisma, and Condon’s dry wit. There’s even the define of a soulful story in Hayes’s arc, as a washout chasing one final lap simply to really feel like himself once more. But these are sketches, not portraits, brushed apart at any time when one other pair of AirPods Max or sponsor decal calls for display screen time.

F1 is a totally different beast of a racing movie. It needs to burn some rubber and look good doing it, however as soon as the mud settles and Zimmer stops rattling your backbone, it’s simply a turbocharged two-and-a-half hour victory lap to nowhere.

F1 is presently operating in theatres

Published – June 27, 2025 04:24 pm IST