movie review: f1

Checkered flagging: F1
Review by Jeff DeRouen

When a studio wants to make a big, loud, fun summer movie, Joseph Kosinski is the guy to call. He made Top Gun: Maverick, so they know Joe is gonna bring the spectacle and pure entertainment – and if that’s what you’re looking for (who isn’t?!), F1 is perfect.

However, if you like your beautiful sports car movie to have a very nice alternator or maybe transmission, then F1 needs a lot more under the hood. Or F1 is like driving a Corvette with a lawnmower engine. Or something like that.

The movie stars the always charming Brad Pitt as aging race car driver, Sonny Hayes. Sonny agrees to race for his friend whose team needs help (the friend is embodied honorably by Javier Bardem wearing a blazer in every scene). There, Sonny meets the beautiful scientist (Kerry Condon) who’ll become his love interest and the cocky, young hothead played by Damson Idris, a rising talent that proves here that he can command a cinema screen. Damson’s character, Joshua Pierce, will hate Sonny, learn from him, then love him the way all the men in these movies do. The question: is it interesting?

The answer is yes! Kind of. There are effective moments here, but nothing new to offer in the way of character objectives or development. The movie passes, and smartly never lets a scene run too long, but Ehren Kruger is a good writer, so it’s a shame that studios make scribes play these scripts so predictably. I know the guy who gave us Arlington Road can cook, and I wish studios would empower artists like him to break new ground or, at the very least, push boundaries with these narratives. The result would be better movies.

The bottom line is that you’re gonna have a good time with this play-by-the-numbers action sports drama because what you’re there for is the racing and, oh boy, is it good. Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda do with the racetrack what they did with the sky in Top Gun. These guys put the audience in that car with those drivers, and it’s thrilling. See this movie (I say this every week because it’s TRUE) on the biggest screen possible and, I assure you, you will be white knuckling it through every turn. The technical innovations they employed and allowing their stars to ACTUALLY DRIVE the cars (thank you insurance!) gives the movie a fresh energy that can be exhilarating.

I give F1 a confident green light and think it’s worth putting pants on and going to the theatre for the big screen experience. However, I wonder why Hollywood (with ALL of the writers in that town) can’t seem to offer something fresh with the characters in their tentpole scripts. It tells me what the studios think about the audience: that we don’t want them to deviate from the norm. They think we want that standard Hollywood structure filled with all the predictable Tinseltown clichés. I hope the enormous success of Sinners shows executives and bosses that we actually crave originality, because the hits are getting harder to sit through.