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

I’ve sat by way of sufficient summer time films to know when one’s making an attempt to point out off, and F1 doesn’t even faux to play it cool. It kicks issues off with a package deal filled with revving engines, shiny chrome, and the promise of a giant, sweaty comeback, earlier than you’ve even had a crack at your popcorn. It’s obtained Brad Pitt behind the wheel, doing his finest weathered insurgent factor as a former racing star who’s spent the previous couple of many years drifting between racetracks and poor life selections, and truthfully appears sort of into it.

The film kicks off with Pitt suiting up and sliding right into a race automobile like he’s achieved it each morning since beginning, the digicam swooping round him like a music video. The tires scream, Led Zeppelin blares, and for a short, wonderful second, you’ll in all probability consider, cinema is so again.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski — who, recent 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, virtually suffocating. You possibly can scent the burning rubber and listen to the hiss of tire adjustments, however what you not often catch is narrative traction. It desires you to really feel issues, like awe and nostalgia and a few sort of rugged manly craving about glory days and second probabilities. However it’s largely only a very expensive-looking technique to watch vehicles go actually, actually quick.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in a nonetheless from ‘F1’
| Photograph Credit score:
Apple Authentic Movies

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, Velocity Racer, and a couple of dozen sports activities films that swear they’re about extra than simply the sport — simply by no means on IMAX with Dolby Atmos.

Positive, 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 are feeling immersed within the pressure, the hazard, the fantastic 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. Sarcastically, 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 some time, it’s onerous 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 method with expository commentary layered on thick. Each race is narrated like a spotlight reel for the F1 noobs, flattening the strain with intrusive play-by-play (“Sonny’s in final place! That’s not nice 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. Everybody talks like they’re in a Nike advert. At one level, somebody really says, “Generally while you lose, you win,” which, spoiler: means completely nothing.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in a nonetheless from ‘F1’
| Photograph Credit score:
Apple Authentic Movies

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 means. It’s shiny and assured and clearly constructed by individuals who know easy methods to placed on a present. When you simply need to watch attractive vehicles go quick whereas Brad Pitt smolders beneath 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 far more. This factor had all the things — entry to actual F1 races, cameos from precise drivers, a price range large enough to pave a second Monaco — and someway, it nonetheless feels prefer it’s working on fumes.

Nonetheless, for all of the wheelspin, F1 isn’t a complete crash. It simply actually desires to dazzle and ship on the summer time blockbuster promise like Maverick, and for some time, that ambition is enjoyable to look at. You catch flashes of one thing richer in Pitt’s straightforward 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. However these are sketches, not portraits, brushed apart each time one other pair of AirPods Max or sponsor decal calls for display time.

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

F1 is at present working in theatres

Revealed – June 27, 2025 04:24 pm IST