3 hours ago
7
With that amused-cowpoke face of his squashed into his safety helmet, making his sixtysomething cherubic chops bulge in towards his nose, Brad Pitt gets behind the wheel in this outrageously cheesy but fiercely and extravagantly shot Formula One melodrama. Along with a lot of enjoyable hokum about the old guy mentoring the rookie hothead (a plot it broadly shares with Pixar’s 2006 adventure Cars), F1 the Movie gives you the corporate sheen, real-life race footage with Brad as the star in an unreasonably priced car, the tech fetish of the cars themselves (almost making you forget how amazingly ugly they are) with brand names speckling every square inch of every surface, the simulation graphics writ large, and the bizarre occult spectacle of motor racing itself.
This is a movie which (like Barbie) has been licensed by the brand, with Lewis Hamilton credited as a producer; he gets a stately walk-on and plenty of big names are glimpsed. At one stage, Brad notices Max Verstappen out there on the track: “Damn, he’s good!” he mutters. Oh sure, yes, Max Verstappen is good, but is he a reckless, intuitive risk-taker and old-school motor race romantic who might get himself killed chasing some undefinable something out there on the burning, shimmering tarmac? We may never know.
Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a supercool driver who lost his way after a near-fatal crash 30 years ago, got himself back together after a stint in the wilderness as a professional gambler and New York City taxi driver (no flashbacks to that sadly) and now freelances as a race-car hombre, drifting around in his campervan, signing up for races where he can, wowing the young kids with his crazy attack strategies and wily cunning. His old driving buddy Ruben (Javier Bardem), now an owner, is in desperate need of some special old-school magic to revivify his failing team and offers Sonny a slot, to the nervous disapproval of pointy-headed board member and duplicitous creep Banning (Tobias Menzies) and the open disdain of mercurial young driving star Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) who refers to him as “old man”. Is Sonny going to exasperate and yet excite Ruben by breaking all the rules? Oh but yes.
Rangy, good-humoured Sonny soon works his cheeky magic with everyone, especially the technical director Kate McKenna; this is a really good performance from Kerry Condon who stamps hard on the relatability pedal and without whom Brad Pitt and his finite range of expressions might have been floundering. And so we follow Sonny and the team as they compete all over the world from London to Abu Dhabi, each event prefaced with videogame-style graphics of the track and plenty of huge sans-serif titles saying things like “LAP 14”. The arcana of racing is lovingly reproduced, particularly the (to me, baffling) convention of the team meeting where everyone is wearing headphones and headset mics; can they not hear each other without them? Don’t other people at equally large conference tables manage without all this?
Motor racing is a sport in which constituent team members seem to be competing against each other as much as against the opposition, and so it ought to be an ideal subject for a movie treatment. There’s a fair bit of macho silliness here, but the panache with which director Joseph Kosinski puts it together is very entertaining. Condon is a vital fuel ingredient and to a F1 non-believer like me, the result is surreal and spectacular.
