Watching Brad Pitt’s new racing movie, F1 The Movie, I am a bit like a Labrador at the beach.
Because as I try to follow the racing rules, overdone plot beats and famous faces, I am generally confused, have no idea what anyone is doing, am more than a little annoyed by the music and will probably squeeze in a few opportune moments to nap. But on the whole, I’m still excited to be here.
Despite the many, many bumps on the road, F1 still manages to roll us across the finish line — something a bit easier perhaps for a genre whose only demand is showing things go really fast.
Following itinerant, woebegone Formula 1 racing alum Sonny Hayes (Pitt), the film hits all the requirements of the genre. Hayes is a down-on-his-luck, grizzled vet with a chip on his shoulder, and when we meet him, he’s skipping around the world’s racing circuits as a gun-for-hire. Anyone looking for a devil-may-care driver to push them over the edge is enough to get him. What if they can’t pay much? Doesn’t matter. Money, Hayes assures us, isn’t the point.
So what is the point? That’s a fuzzy proposition — one that only gets fuzzier as his old racing buddy Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) tracks him down at one of the rathole dive bars he frequents these days. Cervantes is wearing a Gucci suit, but the flash is for show — despite ruling the roost as the owner of the APX F1 racing team, he’s currently $350 million in the hole.
WATCH | F1 The Movie trailer:
It gets worse. Cervantes’s lead driver has hit the road, his other driver is the renegade rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), and if his pathetic team doesn’t manage to win at least one of the nine races left in the season, the board can force Cervantes to sell.
This makes Hayes his best bet; or, his best bet after nine earlier options turned him down. In Hayes’s favour is his erstwhile superstar status. That is, before a spectacular crash broke a couple of vertebrae and forced him into the relatively slower lanes of NASCAR and off-road racing.
At the same time, Hayes’s clinically cavalier attitude at least gives Cervantes a shot. But this entails Hayes and Pearce getting over their egos to help one another, instead of turning their souped-up testosterone-mobiles into 300 km/h metaphors for unmanaged inadequacy complexes and chronic intimacy intolerance.
So in essence, Ford v. Ferrari. Or Rush. Or, perhaps most similarly, Talladega Nights.
Or really, any racing movie ever made. The films are never about racing per se, but about the romantic ideals of self-destructive masculine pride and will-they-or-won’t-they competitive camaraderie. This time, the through-line is something closer to Call Me By Your Name: a mentorship-slash-rivalry between Hayes and Pearce that — for the most part — gives the otherwise formulaic plot some momentum.
Which, to be fair, is the least interesting form of momentum on offer when judging a movie promising so much exhilarating action it advertised through a haptic trailer. This is an Imax feature using characters as an excuse for racing, and it shows — primarily, for how much those racing scenes pop.
With cameras mounted on the hoods, dashes, rooftops and bumpers of the most popular motorsport in the world, F1 performs best as all good racing movies do: when all the annoying storylines have been dealt with so we can get back to the track, the whole reason we and our dads bothered heading to the theatre.
This is good given the fact that the canned, often clunky non-racing scenes alternately drag or work against the film’s theme. For example, Hayes’s constant flirting with team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) might not flesh out either of the characters, but where would we be without a romantic subplot?
The contrived one-liners don’t evoke an Ocean’s 11 old-school vibe so much as draw attention to how far from classic this film is. Maybe we can excuse Bardem for unironically uttering the line, “The board is up my ass.” Or rejigging Talladega Nights‘ satirical quip “If you’re not first, you’re last” into the more self-serious “Sometimes when you lose, you win.”
And what about when McKenna cuttingly remarks, “They’re saying Sonny Hayes isn’t a has-been — he’s a never-was”? Well, that one’s a bit harder to forgive.
For those without deep knowledge of Formula 1, what may be worse is the logic of the races themselves.
Hayes’s whole schtick is fudging the arcane rules of the sport to force an advantage — a sort of Moneyball rehash for Pitt, except with fewer whiteboards. For those of us lacking the experiential understanding of how, for example, damaged wings can lead to red flags, it may be a bit hard to keep track of the how or why of it all.
If it weren’t for the frequently yelled explanations from racing analysts describing just how Hayes has subverted the rules, it may be impossible to follow why he’s so impressive at all.
Or whether he’s ingeniously winning or blatantly losing when he and his partner crash into a barrier. And another barrier. And lose. And lose again. And, infuriatingly, tease the audience with more failure to the point where you wonder whether these are the same guys tailgating you on duller stretches of Highway 1.
Which, again, is less important than how fast the cars go. Complaining about the structure feels like a fool’s errand — though it would be even more foolish not to mention how the ending seems to invalidate everything that came before. There’s a bait-and-switch that takes Hayes’s character arc and completely undoes it. The film uses a thousand symbols pointing out how the allure of racing glory has been destroying him, only to then twist them around to say he was always right to yearn for it.
It is the screenwriting equivalent of Fast & Furious actors’ contractual requirement that they don’t lose fights, in order to ensure they continue looking heroic. It is the character-growth equivalent of having their cake and eating it, too, and then eating seven more. And then opening a bakery.
It’s a silly, counterproductive narrative failing. But really, who cares? We’re here to see cars go fast. And when Pitt’s behind the wheel, do they ever.
