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A Formula Movie Saved by Dedication and Tact

F1 was made by much of the same team that made Top Gun: Maverick, and it could be argued the movie is a mere retread of that one. In fact, and with Jerry Bruckheimer serving as producer, I’m not convinced this movie wasn’t originally conceived as a direct Maverick-style lega-sequel for Days of Thunder, Bruckheimer, Tony Scott, and Tom Cruise’s lacklustre NASCAR follow-up to the original Top Gun. If that wasn’t the case, then it is certainly fascinating that the creative teams behind both fighter jet movies decided that a racing film was their natural next project. As these remixes of prior successes go, F1 is the better movie.
A part of that may be down to director Joseph Kosinski knowing his lane well and pouring all his energy into making that as slick and impressive as possible. That lane of course being the high-octane action of the subject and the plain but strongly focused stakes and character tensions. All of it does of course feel highly reminiscent to Top Gun: Maverick, and it is modestly less interesting this time around where the sincerity is more obviously manufactured and the context a lot less dramatic -military pilots with the fate of nations at stake in their missions isn’t the same as race car drivers determined to win an arbitrary trophy. And yet there is still some sense of real gravity there.
Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a middle-aged race car driver getting by on gambling and winning individual racing competitions after having been a hotshot star for Formula One in the early 90s before a severe crash at the Spanish Grand Prix killed his professional career and made him disillusioned. After winning the 24 Hours of Daytona, he is recruited by his old teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem) to join his struggling F1 team that is in dire straits. Hayes accepts the offer to be second driver to the cocky upstart Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), with whom he comes into pretty immediate conflict on matters of generation and ego -the two ultimately having to work together to take the last place team to victory.
The movie is entrenched in racing culture and was unsurprisingly produced in collaboration with the FIA, the international organization that governs Formula One and no doubt gave the filmmakers access to their resources, technology, cars, and even celebrities. As a result it is impossible to take in this movie as a completely honest depiction of that world and its systems. Much like Top Gun: Maverick had that constant underpinning of military propaganda, F1 is a marketing machine designed to sell its audience on Formula One and the importance of its brand of motor-sports. And the film makes no real effort to hide its other product placements and corporate approval as well. With these colouring the atmosphere, there is a real shallowness to the world being depicted. Formula One is an entirely neutral institution. The threat to the team is wholly consolidated in one corrupt official played by Tobias Menzies, and the motivations for every one of the technicians and engineers, let alone the racers, is ultimately pure in a love for the sport.
But does Kosinski ever try his damnedest to make that sport feel worthy of such inspiration and adulation. Though his certainly isn't a new approach when it comes to illustrating car races on film, it is the right one: keeping the camera close on the driver and on their point-of-view on the track, with as few objective shots as possible, edited during races into a rhythmic frenzy that communicates both intensity and scale without ever being visually incomprehensible. It's similar to the tact and the techniques he used on fighter jets and it works about as well here at immersing the audience in the space of the scene. You feel the intimacy of the cars and believe that these actors are actually driving them, the sharp editing doing an excellent job of hiding any seams. It gives the races some weight and the segmented beats more visual energy, even as some race sequences go on a bit long and run out of novelty -the climactic one especially, taking up about the last half-hour, starts to run out of steam before its climax hits, though it does manage one nicely evocative moment by the end.
That effect and the modestly sincere beat for the hero it is an aid of works due to some good characterization on the part of both Ehren Kruger’s script and the performances. There is nothing inherently compelling to it -no surprise that a Formula One movie has formula archetypes, but they are roundly brought to life through a mixture of dedication and tenacity. Pitt gives perhaps his best performance of subtlety since Ad Astra in his first Hollywood movie to really acknowledge his age. Hayes is referred to as “Old Man” by Pearce in several instances, and he does look it -in that artificial Brad Pitt kind of way, but nonetheless. That movie star cool is still there, and the part highly compliments Pitt in the same way Maverick did to Tom Cruise -but as in that film there is an undercurrent of pathos in the character, which Pitt brings out well. Meanwhile a hotheaded Idris makes for a great charismatic foil, Bardem is a surprisingly believable smooth underdog; but it is Kerry Condon as tech engineer Kate, Hayes's de facto love interest, who is the film's great scene stealer. A firebrand of wit and the most driven person on the team, she is a total delight -her relationship towards Hayes illustrated nicely through an even mix of skepticism and curiosity.
Much like Kate, the movie's production is rigorously competent, and it evokes the kind of Hollywood slickness that characterized the films of Bruckheimer's heyday -though notably more tasteful and a fair bit more introspective. It is a nostalgia movie, but in tone rather than content, which does make some difference. However, as is Kosinski's preference, the film is as broad as possible, so careful to remain apolitical and not bite the hand feeding it, that it takes relatively few real narrative risks. Character drama picks up the slack for some of that, but it doesn't keep the film from having a dull oasis now and again that might again have been solved by a little more trimming. 
F1 is less a race car of a movie than it is a show-car: shiny and immaculate in presentation, but inevitably with some bugs in the test drive. However it gets you where you're meant to go reasonably enough and even with a couple surprises along the road. The sensation is effective more than the parts or the decals. And it drives real easy.

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