Pitt crew par excellence: Racing epic F1 delivers days of thunder, nights of lightning | Canada Voices

F1

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

Written by Ehren Kruger

Starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris and Javier Bardem

Classification PG; 156 minutes

Opens in theatres June 27

Critic’s Pick

A hotshot kid who is too cocky to realize that he lacks the discipline of a true champion. A washed-up has-been who has just one last shot at redemption. And a love interest with the mind of a neuroscientist but the looks of a goddess. Yeah, yeah – the filmmakers behind the new race-car thriller F1 are not exactly reinventing the Pirelli-outfitted wheels here. But at least everyone involved in the movie knows just what kind of game they’re playing. After all, the “F” in F1 stands for “formula.”

And what a knock-down, bare-knuckle, go-go-go-go formula director Joseph Kosinski and his team have concocted – the kind of big and brawny blockbuster that will make even the most cynical cinephile instinctively lean forward a half-dozen times before the one-hour mark, desperately trying to get their eyeballs as close to the screen as possible. Nothing is exactly new in F1, yet at the same time it is all immensely, rewardingly renewable – a true blue box of recycled cinematic trash, compacted into something irresistibly bright and shiny.

The basics of the story are just that – bare-bone sketches of people who, despite their thin personas and even more emaciated predicaments, compel you to stand behind them as they face the most impossible (really, implausible) odds.

Leading the pack is Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a vagabond race-car driver who, decades after crashing out on a Formula One track, balances his gambling addiction with for-hire jobs, travelling America’s racing circuit in his beat-up camper van. A Daytona win here, a Baja dune-buggy race there – so long as Sonny has speed on his side, he’s happy.

But one day along comes his old F1 teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem), who needs a favour: His team is hemorrhaging cash, and unless they notch a championship, he’ll be broke. Ruben’s one hope is a rookie named Joshua (Damson Idris), who seems more concerned with his social-media profiles than life on the track. Can Sonny mentor Joshua, while maybe scoring the F1 championship that eluded him so many decades ago?

Cue the tough love, the close calls and the meet-cute between Sonny and Kate (Kerry Condon), the team’s resident technical director who was, of course, poached from NASA. Anyone who has seen a movie – not just a race-car movie like Days of Thunder or Rush or Driven, but any kind of movie, ever – will recognize the narrative beats of Ehren Kruger’s screenplay from several miles of tracks away. Sonny and Joshua’s push-and-shove relationship. Sonny and Kate’s let’s-be-professional flirtations. Sonny and Ruben’s buried grudges and unearthed grievances. And of course in the background, the curious machinations of Ruben’s corporate toady (Tobias Menzies).

But Kosinski recognizes that no one goes to see a movie like F1 for the script, and juices each and every scene with the kind of electric pop that made his last blockbuster, a little sleeper called Top Gun: Maverick, so blissfully entertaining. (Try to forget about the Netflix movie he made in between that Tom Cruise hit and F1, as almost everyone else has.)

The racing scenes are slick, nerve-rattling affairs, Kosinski pushing his cameras so deep into the driver’s seat and so close to the asphalt that you feel every swerve and jerk. (It deserves to be seen in IMAX, even though it wasn’t shot with IMAX cameras.) The locations – an atlas’s worth of exotic pit stops that would make Carmen Sandiego blush – are almost consistently backlit by literal fireworks. The techno-by-way-of-Wagner score, courtesy of Hans Zimmer, pounds and rattles in the most hypnotic of ways.

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And the cast is ridiculously stacked, not only uniformly and absurdly attractive – Kosinski lights each so well that it’ll make you wonder why his gaffers have been hiding from the rest of Hollywood – but fully locked in to the ridiculousness.

Pitt, who hasn’t been this good since Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – coincidentally or not also the last time he played a dude who lived in a trailer – perfectly balances his natural movie-star charm with a prestige kind of sleaze. If Sonny is indeed the racing world’s biggest loser, then the industry is doing pretty well, all things considered. (There’s a running joke about how old Sonny is, but it never lands because the guy is played by, again, Brad Pitt.)

Idris, Bardem, and Menzies also spit-polish their stock characters till they shine, while Kosinski wisely stacks the margins with such dependable faces as Shea Whigham (a grizzled NASCAR veteran who disappears from the film far too quickly) and Sarah Niles (Joshua’s no-nonsense mother).

But it is the Irish actor Condon, perhaps best known for her work with playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who consistently steals the spotlight out from under her more marquee-level co-stars. Playful but poised, hard-nosed but open-hearted, Kate is the kind of confounding character who screenwriters love to imagine exists in real life, just waiting around for a guy like Sonny (i.e.: Pitt) to come along and set their world right.

Yet as contradictorily sketched as her character might be, Condon pulls the trick off and then some. A semi-scoundrel like Sonny might not deserve such a woman as Kate, but audiences deserve to see Kate happy, so it is an easy enough contrivance to get behind.

And that’s ultimately what F1 is – a pileup of contrivances, big and small. But when it is all assembled by Kosinski with such craftsmanship – such fervent, relentlessly crowd-pleasing commitment to the bit – that the line between formulaic and formidability blur so magnificently. Shut up and drive.