Tom Cruise tried to recapture his success with Top Gun by turning to the racing world with Days of Thunder, which used the same basic premise. It is fitting that Top Gun:Maverick‘s director Joseph Kosinski now seeks to follow up on his breakout success with a turn to racing in F1. With all four films under Jerry Bruckheimer’s producing tutelage, they all deliver thrill rides, and F1 might brazenly claim to be the best of the four.
Instead of Cruise, it is Brad Pitt that anchors this film. Playing a washed-up driver who has raced everything but Formula One since an accident decades prior, Pitt oozes charm and charisma and reminds us why he is still a man with star power. He plays the type of assured smart alec that we’ve seen many times in movies like these, but such is Pitt’s talent that his character remains infinitely likable. He even manages to inject some humanity alongside it all.
Much is familiar about this movie aside from its lead character. If you’ve seen any type of underdog sports film before, the movie drives along a well-trodden track. Pitt’s Sonny is called in to join a floundering F1 racing team that faces a sale at the end of the season if they aren’t successful. Sonny lacks experience in F1 racing and brazenly flaunts tradition by racing a rougher, more “cowboy” style that upsets the European fans of the sport.
That the movie remains so entertaining despite how worn it all is is a testament to the power of good editing, directing, and micro-level writing. Kosinski pulls on the skills he’s learned working with Cruise and Bruckheimer to deliver a film that moves along at a steady pace and delivers just the right amount of character and tension to keep you anchored. The racing scenes present new, creative camera angles and approaches to avoid feeling like every other racing movie you’ve seen. The sound design makes the cars roar, capturing the intensity of actual F1 racing, which is the fastest motorsport in the world.
The script also does an excellent job of not holding the audience’s hand when it comes to the rules of F1 racing, yet it also avoids any exposition dumping. Many scenes in the film have their tension built on particulars of the pit stop rules, the physics of passing, and other racing strategy. So many lesser films would rain exposition down on the audience to explain how it all works, but F1 does none of that and simply trusts the audience to understand enough to be invested. The skillful filmmaking is part of the sauce there as well, as the camera puts focus on actor’s faces in the right moments and the editing cuts precisely so that the dramatic arc of each given scene comes across well.
F1 isn’t without fault. Especially as it reaches the third act, the film starts to hastily resolve some character conflicts. A large chunk of the film shows Sonny clashing with the team’s rookie Joshua (Damson Idris), a young, media-hungry hotshot. Both struggle to work together throughout the film and the conflict feels palpable, but it is resolved a tad hastily in the end. The film also adds on a twist sort-of villain in the end to add extra stakes to the finale that were frankly unnecessary, and this bogs down the film in extra plot details that weren’t adding anything to the overall story and arc.
That said, F1 does more than enough right to be lauded. It is a largely mature and fun sports drama with witty dialogue, a movie in the vein of something that rarely gets made anymore. It is hard to call it an original film, given its plot and being a licensed product to promote Formula One, but it is clearly different from many of the IP blockbusters to come out this summer. Audiences should give this chance and remember what summer films can be without capes or dinosaurs.
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