Brad Pitt Puts The Pedal To The Metal

F1: The Movie starts, ominously enough, with the black Warners logo, which suggests it’s going the be The Dark Knight Rises of sports movies. But although it never really relaxes into the fun, ’60s-style Paul Newman picture it might have been, F1 never takes itself too seriously. You might go to it with solemn images in mind of the old-school maverick driver classics — Grand Prix (1966) and Le Mans (1971) — which is a vibe director Joseph Kosinski does prize highly and a role that fits Brad Pitt quite snugly. But there’s an amiable surrogate-family movie just vrooming to get out, and the strange thing is that the recent release it more strongly resembles, down to its weird, squishy logo, is the last Mission: Impossible, since, although it’s definitely about American way of winning, the emphasis is as much on high-tech teamwork as it is on traditional star wattage.

There’s a significant overlap with Once Upon a Time’s Cliff Booth in Sonny Hayes, the driver Pitt plays. Unlike the recent M:1 movie, his age is mentioned — and mentioned a lot, never in an admiring way. In fact, we start the movie at The 24 Hours of Daytona race, an endurance event that he is clearly doing for the money. His backstory involves a terrible crash at the Spanish Grand Prix in his thirties which still gives him nightmares (and explains the film’s cryptic opening, in which calming ocean waves are interpolated with gritty video images of a high-speed race). Sonny, we learn, is the couldabeen that never was, his rock’n’roll bona fides confirmed when Kosinki drops Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” onto the soundtrack, making great use of its atonal midsection.

Everything is laid out here, from his Sonny’s contempt for authority to his capacity for superstition. He gambles; before every race he pockets a playing card (sight unseen); and whenever he wins, he refuses to handle the cup (“It’s bad luck,” he believes). But like the gangster who’s out of the game, his past comes calling when a face from the past shows up while he’s doing his laundry. Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) is an old adversary who now runs APXGP and is $350 million in the hole. “I need a new driver,” he says, flashing an old magazine cover touting their young selves as The Rising Stars of F1. Sonny says no, but Cervantes won’t hear it. “What would he want you to do?” asks Cervantes, pointing to Sonny’s younger, blonder self. “Join a boy band?” he shrugs.

Inevitably, Sonny does join the team, led by star driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who greets Sonny with horror and prompts a lot of talk about whether an oldie has ever won an F1 race (that will be Luigi Fagioli, who was 53 when he won the 1951 Grand Prix in France). Their sparring goes exactly the way you think it might, and Pearce soon begins to see the appreciate the long-gestating method in Sonny’s madness (there’s a lot of talk about cold and hot tyres, and the judicious timing of pit stops). But then, Sonny wins over the whole team too, from company board director Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), to team manager Kaspar Molinski (the great Kim Bodnia) and, most crucially, APXGP’s technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), a science genius nursing a broken heart.

The plot, such as it is, involves Sonny’s unorthodox attempts to get APXGP back on track, and although you know which way the wind will blow in the end, there’s a lot of enjoyable, self-deprecating bathos that you would probably never get from a Tom Cruise movie. Unfortunately, Sonny’s hijinks don’t exactly chime with the way Formula One is heading (to borrow Donald Trump’s famous phrase on encountering a Tesla for the first time, “Everything’s computer!”). As a result, the film seems to toggle between a nostalgia for the traditional iconography of the lone man at the wheel (Sonny’s mantra is “put your head down and drive) and a respect for the technicians that, through aerodynamic design and such, snatch all-important fractions of sections when racing at over 200mph.

Inevitably, F1 does somewhat sidestep criticisms of the Formula One community, but it does land some punches when it can, in terms of the organization’s vice-like grip and the absurd proliferation of branding (Kosinski’s film has it both ways, with much placement for Expensify and Tommy Hilfiger. It probably also romanticizes the sport’s largely male skew, leavening Kerry Condon’s role as the sole female (about from Pearce’s overly protective mum), who also serves as the film’s sort of age-appropriate love interest.

Where it will place in the summer-movie stakes, however, is hard to predict, given the fate of recent race movies such as James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari (a hit) and Michael Mann’s Ferrari (very much not a hit). Awards prognostication is similarly fuzzy too, although technical noms will be its strongest play. But whether or not it finds it audience (and there are probably a lot of easter eggs for viewers who know a hell of a lot more about Formula One than I do), F1 is proof that brand Pitt is still a viable option and, like Tom Cruise, can still hold a movie the old-fashioned way, putting pedal to the metal.

Title: F1: The Movie
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Screenwriter: Ehren Kruger
Cast: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Javier Bardem, Kim Bodnia Shea Whigham
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Running time: 2 hrs 36 mins