F1 insults the audience’s need for thrills.
The IMAX “Vroom!” that overpowers audiences at F1: The Movie belongs to the clichés and mechanical storytelling that undiscriminating reviewers praise as “immersive” entertainment. They promote this Jerry Bruckheimer production for Millennials who don’t know how Bruckheimer made his name — those formulaic Simpson-Bruckheimer Paramount movies of the 1980s that had labels instead of titles: Beverly Hills Cop, Thief of Hearts, Flashdance, The Fan, Trading Places, Explorers, Bad Boys, Days of Thunder, Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Dangerous Minds.
As with those releases, Bruckheimer (now working without his late partner Don Simpson) hardly bothers with a new title. F1: The Movie is such shameless branding that it sells product before selling Brad Pitt. Pitt plays has-been white American auto racer Sonny Hayes, who comes back to the sport partly to rescue his old track team, but he must compete with a young black British rival, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), to confirm his skill and prowess. There’s little else to sell except noise, speed, and Pitt’s undeniable movie-star power — and that’s where the formula offends our cultural awareness.
Sonny’s buddy-buddy competition with Pearce recalls Pitt’s bleeding-heart abolitionist role in 12 Years a Slave, but this rivalry also racializes the same top dog/underdog story that Tom Cruise (an ’80s Paramount alumnus) told in Top Gun: Maverick. Director Joseph Kosinski repeats his Maverick stunt work, a hollow emphasis on sound effects and action editing, plus virtual-reality perspectives and close-ups that bamboozled viewers as a celebration of American exceptionalism. (Think of an aerial, military The Dukes of Hazzard with a Confederate flag atop the “General Lee” Dodge Charger.) In F1, Sonny first demonstrates his stuff to the tune of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” a pop-culture ploy straight out of Top Gun and innumerable TV commercials.
Kosinski isn’t exactly a montage master. F1’s racing scenes don’t match Walter Hill’s The Driver, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, or Michael Bay’s astonishing 6 Underground and Ambulance — the best of all automotive cinematic sensations. Kosinski’s hackwork typifies the unexceptional spectacle of Millennial movies (so recently endured with Cruise’s Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning), where the effort to overwhelm uses technology to merely over-market what is essentially unoriginal content. (Think of Brad Pitt retooling his inside-baseball movie Moneyball, that pseudo-intellectual waste of his charisma.)
For race-car film buffs, F1 is no more exciting than Grand Prix, The French Connection, The Road Warrior, Rush, the first Fast and Furious movie, or the underrated The Seven-Ups. Even Jared Hess’s fantasy speed-romps in A Minecraft Movie were more delightful. In F1, the race scenes are meant to be awesome, but they achieve the low of unabashed marketing. There’s a hint of globalist arrogance in F1 aimed at besting the all-Americanism of Ford v Ferrari, particularly when Pitt deals with Europeans Pearce and Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), the technical director of the APXGP racing team owned by Sonny’s old racing-track mate, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who fears that the company is $350 million in debt. Is there a connection between that figure and F1 costing $300 million? Industry-media calculations say the film needs to earn at least twice its cost to break even.
Watching Brad Pitt play a Millennial duke of hazard causes dissatisfaction, especially when Sonny’s flaws are as superficial as Cruise’s in Maverick. For all the film’s commotion, its vicarious “excitement” is unmoving. Even Michael Mann’s Euro-set biopic Ferrari offered some complex, race-car insight about the tragic 1957 Mille Miglia race that almost justified Mann’s artsiness, and Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights found genuine humor in the American need for speed that created a genuine cultural pastime. The blatant hard drive and hard sell of F1 insult the public’s need for entertainment.