Cliches and product placement plague a film so corporate it comes with its own registered trademark symbol
Director Joseph Kosinski has certainly found his niche. Having delivered Top Gun: Maverick, a hokey but highly enjoyable high-speed battle of alpha-male egos, presided over by an uber-cool old-timer who teaches the youngsters a trick or two, Kosinski applies almost exactly the same blueprint to his Formula One action flick, F1: The Movie.
Grizzled veteran Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a driver whose F1 dreams ended in a smoking pile of twisted metal 30 years ago, is determined to prove himself once again – to the industry that wrote him off, to Joshua (Damson Idris), the cocky young teammate who dismisses him as an “old man”, to himself. It’s essentially a turbocharged midlife crisis of a movie, with Pitt smirking his way through a role that positions him as an all-American, Marlboro Man wish-fulfilment template for every fiftysomething middle manager who ever bought himself a set of motorcycle leathers. It manages to be both eye-rollingly corny and edge-of-the-seat exciting.
This is a movie that is filled with personalities as superpowered as the cars they drive. Pitt’s lazy, complacent charisma suits Sonny, the world-weary career driver with a bucket list of races left to win and a horror of slotting neatly in as a team player. It is, however, a slight stretch to believe him as a man who lives out of a van, travelling from event to event. Burnished, a little crinkly around the edges, he looks like an expensive and well-cared-for piece of luggage.
Pitt smirks his way through his role as an all-American, Marlboro Man wish-fulfilment template for every fiftysomething who ever bought himself a set of leathers
Young British-Nigerian actor Idris (Snowfall) injects complexity into the aggressive, image-conscious Joshua, hinting at vulnerability and self-doubt under the bluster and braggadocio. Javier Bardem, as Ruben, Sonny’s former rival and now the owner of failing F1 team APXGP, has very little to do beyond looking exceptionally good in an expensive suit and wincing as yet another multimillion-dollar machine gets crunched like an empty fizzy drinks can. The most intriguing character, and by no small margin the most textured performance, is Kerry Condon as the team’s sparky technical director and Sonny’s love interest, Kate McKenna.
An outsider by virtue of her sex and her training as an aeronautical engineer, Condon plays Kate with one ironic eyebrow raised, vaguely derisive of these absurd men and their stupidly expensive and dangerous toys – but also seduced by the thrills, the camaraderie and Sonny’s collection of creaky 1990s pick-up lines. Obviously, it would be preferable if the visionary female engineer didn’t end the film Bambi-eyed and dangling from Sonny’s arm like an accessory, but we can’t have everything.
Like any film developed in conjunction with a trademarked product and company, whether it’s Lego, Barbie or F1, this is as much a brand-positioning exercise as it is a piece of entertainment. Sonny is a precision-tooled component designed to add something to the well-oiled business machine of F1. He brings romance, freedom, a rebellious, devil-may-care attitude. He adds, according to one slippery board member, a “punk rock” spirit to the team. It’s clear what they’re aiming for, but it’s hard to think of anything less punk than F1, a sport so corporate that even the film’s title and posters come with their own registered trademark symbol.
“It’s not about the money,” is a line that Sonny delivers so frequently it starts to feel like a mantra. It’s a sentiment that would seem more credible if approximately 50% of the frame wasn’t filled with product placement at any given time.
It would be easy to dismiss the film as just another predictable relay of sport movie cliches: underdogs fight back, redemptive second chances abound, valuable life lessons are grudgingly learned. But what sets the movie apart is the bravura technical prowess required to capture these 200mph-plus psychological tussles.
In this aspect, Kosinski is one of the very best. Anyone who has seen Claude Lelouch’s nine-minute short film C’était un rendez-vous (in my opinion, the greatest fast car flick ever made) will know that a technique as simple as a camera strapped to the bumper of a sports car can produce footage of heart-stopping intensity.
But Kosinski ups the ante with dizzyingly complex shots using rotating camera heads and driver’s-eye perspectives that bring unexpected intimacy to our experience of the races. The cars may be the stars, but the camera team, led by Top Gun: Maverick cinematographer Claudio Miranda, are the wizards who keep the wheels turning.
F1: The Movie (155 mins, 12A) Directed by Joseph Kosinski; starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Photograph by Warner Bros
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