It’d be easy to dismiss this film as dadslop, and don’t get me wrong, it absolutely is dadslop, but really F1 is an exercise in reputation-washing; for F1, which itself only seems to exist to sportswash, and for Brad Pitt, who after abuse allegations needed a movie that portrayed him as the coolest man who ever lived.
It is absurd (though sadly due to the crushing length and absolute tedium of most of this film, never hilarious) the lengths this movie goes to to make Brad Pitt seem cool. Obviously, there are articles on the “charm offensive” that Pitt has undertaken, but this movie has the mania of a low-budget vanity project that just happened to cost hundreds of million dollars. You cannot watch this film and not see a man who seems to be willing himself to be the reincarnation of Robert Redford even though at the time of filming he wasn’t dead yet. If you told me Pitt was doing weird demonic rituals, burning frames from The Natural in the middle of a pentagram, snorting them, mixing them with his blood, crying, screaming, “make me Robert Redford but cooler” I’d shrug and go “seems believable.”
You could say I’m beating up on Pitt a bit too much here; after all Tom Cruise has been playing the greatest man who ever lived in every movie he’s made for years now, and his closets will almost certainly spring open one day with a comedy “BOI-O-OING” noise and shower everyone with a Paris Catacombs. But (bar the last) those movies seemed to still be genuinely engaged with entertaining, whereas F1 seems like it only sprung into existence because someone at Apple collated user data and worked out that F1 had a cross-cultural synergy across age groups when paired with X established actor and blah blah blah fucking blah.
Despite being pointlessly bloated, you almost have to respect F1’s monomania. Sure, the movie is like they grabbed sport movie clichés from a bag like Scrabble tiles and scattered them without care–the movie doesn’t even bother to feature an “evil” racing team of burly Swedes or something, and it really does miss them (a shot of Lewis Hamilton snarling doesn’t count)–but you can see that they needed to expend that effort on showing that in every situation Pitt’s character is not just right but unselfishly so. The other driver on the team he’s parachuted into hates him with the burning passion of a toddler who’s been told he has to let his brother get a shot on the steering wheel, and yet Pitt does nothing but work his arse off to elevate him. He gets (understandably) annoyed once, then immediately goes back to being a cool big brother who “lets him win”. The trad. “darkest before dawn” moment only comes because he’s just so damn angry on the team’s behalf. And the movie pulls an incredible “have your cake and eat it” move in the finale, where he wins the big final race because he was trying to selflessly not win it.
The movie drowns in hagiographic detail. There’s a section in this movie where Pitt’s character defends a member of the pit crew who made a mistake and then later gives her a pep talk; this character has basically nothing to do with anything else in the movie (indeed they have no character to speak of) and it immediately reminded me of the part of Tiger Schroff vehicle Heropanti 2 where he offers to help someone in a wheelchair who transparently doesn’t need help. You could cut this stuff!!! The movie is 155 minutes long!!!
I suppose your question at this point might be “well, is the driving any good?” and it’s… fine. Car go fast is good, obviously, though there’s not that much of it, because we need to hear from a lot of characters restating exposition instead, and as an Apple film they don’t want you to have to look up from your laundry too much anyway. And I did find the moment in the climax where we’re supposed to experience the transcendence of speed confusing because it really reads like Brad Pitt is about to die. Of course, the only way that would have happened in this movie would have been so he could meet god, who would be like “ah man, I can’t compete. You’re just so cool.”
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