F1® The Movie

directed by Joseph Kosinski

“They’re saying Sonny Hayes isn’t a has-been. He’s a never-was.”

—Kate McKenna, APXGP Technical Director

In Olden Times, Formula One was called Grand Prix racing, and it was a sport. Then it became a business and, in Bernie Ecclestone’s hands, F1 (q.v.) was pimped around the world to the highest bidder. Soon, it was au revoir Paul Ricard and auf Wiedersehen Hockenheim, and hello sundry racing Meccas like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Sochi and Shanghai, inter (many) alia. In an affront to geography, the Azerbaijan GP in 2017 was even dubbed the European GP.

And now, thanks to Liberty Media and Netflix’s Drive to Survive, F1® The Movie (check out that trademark!) has become a reality TV show, with 24 episodes a season—it’s become that 21st century monster, a Brand! F1® The Movie is thus a film about a TV show about a business which used to be a sport, which is so meta that we’re sailing close to the pastel-hued shores of a Wes Anderson movie.

The director is Joseph Kozinski whose CV is more blockbuster than arthouse—take your pick from Top Gun Maverick, Oblivion, Tron: The Legacy (etc). His mission here? “To bring Formula One to the big screen in a way that’s never been seen before.” Having spent 2h 36m watching F1® The Movie (56 minutes longer than the time Lando Norris took to win this year’s Monaco Grand Prix) I won’t disagree, but can it be a better film than its surprisingly few predecessors? Read on . . .

A quick recap of the story: Sonny Hayes was going to be The Next Big Thing in early 1990s Formula One but an accident ended his career and nearly cost him his life. Since then, our man has bummed around in a Brad Pitt sort of way—in the manner of Quentin Tarantino’s excellent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Failed marriage, gambling addiction, and years spent taking whatever racing gig was going—Baja 1000, Daytona 24 Hours—but never a return to the big time. It happens, right? So, we see our Brad, sorry Sonny, wrestling a Porsche around Daytona and making tough-guy wisecracks to anybody in earshot. Brad/Sonny has still got it; he’s still a mensch among boys. But, out of the blue, he’s being approached by his erstwhile team-mate, Ruben Cervantes (the excellent Javier Bardem) who now owns the struggling APXGP F1 team. Think Williams 2022, ok?

Before we get too immersed in what passes for a plot, you might share my view that it’s compulsory for Hollywood racing movies to star an American driver with A Past. Think of the beatified Steve McQueen in Le Mans (great cars, plot MIA) or tough guy James Garner in Grand Prix. But the typical modern F1 driver looks like a refugee from a K Pop band; think Lando Norris, Ollie Bearman, or the absurdly youthful Kimi Antonelli. Do these guys even shave yet? But Brad’s past means that, in his previous incarnation as Martin Donnelly, he had a huge crash in the 1990 Lotus 102 which left him mentally and physically scarred, but much better-looking than the Irishman, and with a bottomless well of one-liner putdowns.

The movie, then? I confess that I thought it would be as terrible as most racing movies are. Brad Pitt’s absurd good looks camoflage his acting chops (the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading and Once Upon a Time, et al, are proof of that) but I still doubted if a 61-year-old Pitt was the right fit. But he doesn’t look any older than the oldest man on the current grid, Fernando Alonso, aged 43, so there’s hope. Good movies don’t just need stars though, they need good scripts to alchemize them, and this is where F1® The Movie struggles to get out of Q1.

APXGP has a charismatic team principal in Bardem’s Ruben Cervantes, and technical director Kate McKenna is plausibly played by Kerry Condon, whom you should recognize from her roles in Better Call Saul and The Banshees of Inisherin, just like I didn’t. (Kate & Sonny: will they/won’t they? Spoiler alert: of course they do, nobody can resist Brad’s wolfish grin.) They have a fast young driver in Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) who is young, gifted, and Black but about whom the most interesting thing is his feisty mom Bernadette (Sarah Niles). And too many of the other characters are one-dimensional. Tobias Menzies, so good as the Duke of Edinburgh in The Crown, is wasted as the Machiavellian finance guy Peter Banning. And why is a Brit so often cast as the bad guy in Hollywood films? Is Boston Tea Party resentment still a thing? As for Don Cavendish, the shouty British reporter played by Simon Kunz, nobody’s looked or sounded like that since we lost John Bolster. Which was in 1984 . . .

If you enjoy Drive to Survive, you’ll enjoy this movie. The on-track action is thankfully devoid of the silly tropes found in most race movies, meaning there’s no tiresome down-change then pedal to the metal to overtake the guy in front. Who even needs that when Formula 1 already has the made-for-TV artifice of DRS? The noise, such as it is with a turbo-muted V6, is largely authentic but, just like DtS, even a minor on-track nudge is enhanced by deafening but entirely ersatz rumbles and bangs. Much was made in pre-release marketing of the lengths to which the on-track action was made to look authentic. F2 cars were repurposed as their big brothers, high speed camera vehicles were commissioned, and—yes!—it really was Brad himself (sigh!) behind the wheel. If you will forgive my praising with faint damns, the rather pedestrian outcome was that the in-car stuff looks just like the stuff I watch for free on summer Sunday afternoons.

You’re wondering when am I going to mention the thing that proper movie reviewers focus on? You know, the plot, the narrative arc, the big reveal in the third act? Well, unlike Le Mans the plot isn’t AWOL but this movie’s narrative isn’t even How to Train your Dragon, let alone Citizen Kane. You’re not going to struggle to keep up. This an irony-free film that isn’t taking calls from Mr. Metaphor or Mrs. Allegory. Apart from employing a driver of pensionable age (if not looks) the plot is reasonably coherent. The APX team is punching below its weight and hasn’t scored any points, which means less cash next year and a spiral of doom to come. I know little of other sports, but with real-life characters like Flavio Briatore and Jean-Pierre Van Rossem, Formula 1 has never lacked pantomime villains, so Tobias Menzies’ evil designs for the team’s demise are plausible enough. And we reach peak “‘No Shit, Sherlock” when Sonny and Joshua find out that their biggest rival is—drumroll—only their own team-mate . . .

Mix a Romain Grosjean-style fireball shunt (Bahrain 2020) with wacky pitstop strategies, bodged wheel changes, and on-track antics that make Max Verstappen look like Miss Daisy, season it with some one-line zingers, and it all builds up to some redemptive final laps at Abu Dhabi. I’d better not say more, but I guess co-producer Lewis Hamilton exorcized a few demons in the movie’s climax.

Just as in 1966’s Grand Prix, the film is punctuated with cameos aplenty from real-life players, notably Martin Brundle but also including the likes of Zak Brown and Stefano Domenicali. None are so toe-curlingly dreadful as the worst of their Sixties’ counterparts but, y’know, don’t give up the day job, guys! Most of the pit garage and in-car material looks plausible but there are still some clunkers, such as when Sonny tells paramour-to-be Kate that she needs to make the car quicker in the turns, even if that means compromising on straight-line speed. If only Colin Chapman had come up with that idea first, how many more races might Lotus have won?

Incidentally, although I try to avoid reading reviews if I’m writing my own, I haven’t entirely succeeded in avoiding some swipes and sneers from the pros. One of which, hilariously, is the amount of product placement in the movie. Look guys, this isn’t Daniel Craig wearing a Rolex and driving an Aston (no relation, sadly). It’s the real thing, because literally everything is sponsored in Formula 1—races, teams, cars, gas, podium champagne, circuits, corners (“turns” if you must), drivers, even the TV coverage. What the hell did those reviewers expect? A discreet advertisement from Gulf? But no viewer will be left in doubt that Las Vegas now has its own Grand Prix. That really was a hard sell.

Verdict? Better than I feared. It was enjoyable enough, warts and all. A soundtrack with everything from Dad Rock to EDM and the most non-Ed Sheeran sounding song Sheeran has ever sung. The film is nowhere near as good as Rush as a human story. It doesn’t have to struggle much to improve on Le Mans’ “plot” but it can’t match the saga of Ford v Ferrari (aka Le Mans ’66). Is the almost 60-year-old Grand Prix still on the top step of the podium? Yes, if mainly for the camera work and the look and sound of the cars. But even that film doesn’t transcend its genre like Rocky (1976) or The Damned United (2009) did. You want to watch the best film about motorsport? Then look no further than the non-fictional The Last Race (2018).