At the risk of burying the lede, and contrary to the early critical consensus, I’ll just say it: “F1” (opening in theaters Friday) is boring.
Its dullness isn’t its worst attribute, but for a movie that bombards our senses with speed and noise for the lion’s share of its two-and-a-half-hour running time, it should be too busy to be ponderous. And yet, here we are.
I was with it for a while, particularly its pre-credit scenes, in which renegade motorsports driver Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) prepares for, and then wins, the Daytona 500. The sequence is presented with extravagant pomp and circumstance from director Joseph Kosinski, who brought the same hurtling filmic prose to “Top Gun: Maverick.” Fireworks boom in the sky, and the bass shudders with every gear shift—literally shaking your seat if you see the movie in Dolby surround sound, as I did—all of it soundtracked by Led Zeppelin’s molten palate cleanser “Whole Lotta Love.”
At first, it’s easy to be taken in by the pageantry, but your chair can only shudder so many times before it begins to feel like a nuisance rather than a thrill, and the novelty of an all-access pass to racetracks in the U.K., Belgium, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi fades into an interchangeable blur of screeching tires, helmeted close-ups, reverb-laden broadcasters delivering exposition, and ceaseless product placement. If you desire a Tommy Hilfiger outfit or an IWC watch—or consider switching to T-Mobile—the film will really have done its job. I’m willing to take Kosinski’s word for it that his fast-cutting racing montages have a narrative coherence, but I can’t justify the pervasive sense that I just watched a 156-minute commercial for the F1 luxury lifestyle. (To be fair, I had a similar skepticism toward “Barbie,” a cross-promotional Mattel ad first, and a stealth feminist fairytale second.)
As for the story, like the finish line at Hungaroring, we need to get there eventually, even if we lose a wheel along the way. We meet Pitt’s Sonny Hayes as he dominates the NASCAR circuit but still washes his clothes at a laundromat, the result of a life beset by tragedy and addiction: A nearly fatal crash ended his Formula One career 32 years earlier, and he pissed away his winnings as a professional gambler. He spent some of the intervening decades as a cab driver and racer-for-hire, and despite just emerging victorious at Daytona, he’s down in the dumps when he’s approached by an old rival, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem). Ruben owns a struggling F1 team in the United Kingdom, and he coaxes Sonny to come out of retirement to reverse his fortunes, even if it means pairing the veteran racer with the brash, ageist rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
Pitt portrays Sonny with a mix of “I’m-too-old-for-this-shit” wariness and an impish delight in injecting his team’s staid traditions with his rogue American ways. But if there’s a promising Ted Lasso-ness in this transcontinental underdog story, Ehren Kruger’s mechanical script never realizes such potential. The characters have no personality and dimension beyond their desire to drive fast and to achieve the most rudimentary of character arcs—for Sonny, to earn the respect he never achieved in his earlier career, and for Pearce, to tame his peacocking and respect his elders. The screenplay, which spells everything out as clunkily as a second-grader learning to read, allows no room for imagination or interpretation, and so little feels surprising. Everybody’s an archetype, not a flesh-and-blood person, and it’s only a matter of time before Kerry Condon, as the team’s cerebral technical director Kate McKenna, is reduced to the rote role of Sonny’s requisite love interest.
To the extent that there are any attempts at humor in “F1,” they are shopworn, witless and easily translatable on the international market, which is very likely the point of it all. Sometimes the jokes are worse than awkward. Because race—as in skin color, not motorsports—doesn’t exist in the world of “F1,” nobody thought it a bad look when Pitt’s character insults Idris’ by attacking his “deficient frontal cortex.” Because Idris is young, you see; that’s all. To be clear, I don’t think the filmmakers are racist. It’s just that Kosinski and Kruger are so oblivious to a world outside their F1 bubble that the sociopolitical reverberations of such verbiage never occurred to them.
Am I being too hard on this trifling product? Perhaps. Will it play well in Middle America and Japan and the U.A.E.? Certainly. But if we film critics are not the last line of defense against lazy mediocrities like “F1,” then who is? We can do better.
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