Loosely doing for Days of Thunder what Top Gun: Maverick did for Top Gun, and filling a big Top Gear gap for your dad in the process, F1 is the Jerry Bruckheimiest thing to hit our screens in an age – and it’s a full-throttle triumph. The ’90s are officially back and they’re really, really loud.
With Brad Pitt engaging A-list god mode, a booming Hans Zimmer score, a crateload full of pop and dance bangers, and writer-director Joseph Kosinski hitting the same punch-the-air beats as his superlative 2022 Top Gun reboot, it’s a throwback to simpler days when multi-dimensional characters were a luxury no one could afford, because they’d spent all the money on helicopter shots.
But switch off your brain and F1 will overwhelm your senses with spectacle, sonics and just enough human drama to hold it all together.
A sport so in love with its soapy dramatics, its team chiefs were bitching about each other at the premiere of this movie, the gleaming, hermetic world of F1 isn’t a natural fit for Pitt’s languid charisma. Which is ideal, because his impulsive veteran racing driver, Sonny Hayes, isn’t either.
When we meet him, Sonny is an ex-F1 superstar with a troubled past and a transient present as a driver-for-hire at Daytona. His old pal and F1 team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem, bringing his A-game to a B-grade character) has a proposal for him: help his struggling team finish the season in something other than disgraceful fashion, and stave off the vultures on the board in the process. Pitt’s veteran wheel-jockey is soon rocking up at Silverstone with a bag slung over his shoulder, a chest full of medallions and the air of a man in completely the wrong place. ‘He’s a gambling junkie who’s missed his shot,’ grumbles a new team member. ‘Not a has-been, a never-was’, adds another.
The ’90s are officially back and they’re really, really loud
There’s immediate tension with his new team’s cocky star driver Joshua Peace (Farming’s Damson Idris) and a tense-but-flirty standoff with the team’s technical director (The Banshees of Inisherin’s Kerry Condon).
So, yes, F1 does deliver just about every available comeback story cliché, but when there’s this much rizz and this many thrills, it scarcely matters. And Londoner Idris is a real star-in-the-making here.
And the races? Even for someone who’s sat through about four laps of Formula 1 in his entire life, the race track action is electrifying. It only dragged when the movie ticked well into its second hour and we’d toured most of the world’s race tracks and clocked up our thousandth F1 celebrity cameo (hello – checks notes – Toto Wolff).
It’s hard to draw too much old-school romance from this world of sponsorship, celebrity and sports washing, but F1 manages it on the back of Pitt’s earthy charm. Watch it rev into the canon of great sports movies. Motion sickness tablets recommended.
In UK cinemas Wed Jun 25 and US theaters Fri Jun 27