Brad Pitt Finds Fresh Thrills on a Well-Worn Road in F1: Review

What does it mean to win? For the Formula 1 team at the center of the creatively-titled movie F1, winning a single race means literal survival for their organization. But for the drivers behind the wheel, such as Brad Pitt‘s Sonny Hayes, it goes beyond survival — it means literally everything. The opportunity to know for a fact that you’re the very best in the entire world… at this one thing, at least.

That’s about as thematically deep as Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski gets with his new celebration of men going very very fast, at great risk to their safety, in the the name of greater glory. A big-budget celebration of Formula 1, with an aim to be the definitive Formula 1 movie, F1 certainly captures the adrenaline of being in the driver’s seat on a visceral level, as well as the danger that lurks in every turn of the track.

When the movie begins, our hero Sonny Hayes hasn’t raced Formula 1 for decades (would you believe he has a tragic past that haunts him?). Instead, he’s been living that Nomadland life, living in a van and racing any other vehicle someone will let him drive. When his old racing buddy Ruben (Javier Bardem) asks him to come back to the sport, it’s because Ruben is desperate — he’ll be forced to sell the racing team he owns if they don’t win a race before the season ends. So really, it’s not the money but the promise of glory that compels Sonny to return.

Brad Pitt isn’t so much playing a character as he is playing a somewhat distorted version of his basic movie star persona; sun-kissed good looks and a laugh that comes too easily, all the better to mask the fierce determination driving him forward. Sonny is called an asshole more than once during this movie, and for good reason, because sometimes, Sonny is Chernobyl-level toxic in pursuit of a victory and/or getting his own way. His big idea for how to turn things around for their failing team is to be much more aggressive on the track, to the point of recklessness — he literally gets the entire team chanting “combat! combat!”

And then, Sonny will be sweet towards a junior pit crew member or noble towards his teammate, because he may be a rebel, but the movie still wants you to want him to win. It’s behavior reminiscent of another big-screen “maverick,” and while Tom Cruise did already his big race car movie back in 1990, it’s easy to imagine him watching F1 and seething with jealousy. Because the racing sequences look like they were as thrilling to shoot as they are to watch.

F1 amplifies the innate excitement of cars going vroom-vroom fast into high-octane condensed turbo action — especially thanks to the ability to skip forward 20 or so laps with a single edit, eliminating even the slightest potential for boredom. And the races (filmed frequently at actual F1 races during the 2024 season) play especially well in IMAX, cinematographer Claudio Miranda taking full advantage of the wider frame. At that scale, some of the cockpit POV shots become mind-blowing.

The real star of F1 might be Hans Zimmer’s score — the Oscar-winning Hans Zimmer did not have to go that hard, and yet from the opening credits the movie pulsates with his deep bass-propelled score. With those epic beats as accompaniment, F1 certainly feels like it captures the scope of an entire season of Formula One — though funnily enough, the movie begins halfway through an ongoing season, with nine races left.

Story-wise, the plot is substantial enough to keep F1 from feeling like a two-hour-and-35-minute Formula 1 advertisement. (Yeah, this one’s long.) The bad news is that it covers more than a few of your classic sports movies tropes, such as Sonny’s tragic past, and of course Sonny and talented up-and-comer Joshua (Damson Idris, who makes the most of his limited character development) wind up butting heads. You’ll see some of the other cliches coming a mile down the track, and it feels like there’s maybe one more big plot beat than necessary — F1 is never boring, but you definitely feel that runtime at a certain point.

However, there are a lot of fresh aspects of racing that the movie does a nice job of highlighting: A racing team is only as good as the lowliest member of its pit crew, as one example. Plus, there’s the concept that car racing creates an opportunity for engineers to innovate on a design level — one subplot involves Sonny working with Kate (Kerry Condon), the team’s technical director, to discover some new modifications to make the car more efficient — research that could find applications outside the realm of driving cars around in endless circles.

Kerry Condon was one of the best parts of The Banshees of Inisherin, and also quite memorable for her recurring role on Better Call Saul (Mike’s daughter-in-law!). Here, she’s a delight — passionate about her work, with enough goofy charm to keep her from being a cookie-cutter, albeit age-appropriate, love interest for Sonny.

There are some sharp moments of banter throughout F1, but the movie’s best joke is one of the final lines of the credits: “This program contains product placement.” That… feels like an understatement — there are extremely long stretches of the film where there is at least one corporate logo visible in every single shot. A scene set inside a charming British pub feels disconcerting for its lack of brands, in fact.

However, this is without question an issue endemic to realistically depicting a Formula 1 race, which is of course this movie’s primary reason for existence. And the good news is that fans of the sport — old-timers as well as recent Drive to Survive converts alike — will feel electrified just by the big-screen spectacle of it all. To borrow some parlance that I now feel qualified to wield, this is a movie that hits a few skids, but does at least finish the race. And after watching this movie, you understand how much an achievement just finishing is.

F1 zooms into theaters on Friday, June 27th. Check out the trailer below.