Stream It Or Skip It?

Full stop: F1 (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) will not be the same experience at home. This loud, fast Brad Pitt vehicle (pun totally intended) was extraordinary on IMAX, I can confirm. And I assume it’d be fun on a regular movie theater screen, reasonably enjoyable on your TV, gruesome on your phone and if you see anyone watching it on an airplane, I think it should be legal for you to push that person out the hatch without a parachute. No surprise, then, that it’s from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, who brings his (Tom Cruise-inspired?) fine-tuned eye for technical detail and megaspectacle to an officially sanctioned Formula One movie engineered to rock yer tits off with roaring engines, screeching tires and shots of a rampantly shirtless 61-year-old Pitt. And it was one of the big theatrical successes of the summer, clocking $600 million in ticket sales for its super-spendy studio, Apple, which finally made some money back after a handful of uber-expensive duds (most egregiously, Argylle and Fly Me to the Moon) took the top off the coffers. I can see F1 having some life in the home-viewing sphere, because the sport is huge and the yearning for escapist entertainment is huger. But I can almost guarantee it won’t have the same oomph.

F1: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Sonny Hayes (Pitt) lives in a van. Not down by the river, but at whatever racetrack lures in his mercenary spirit. He wakes up. Sticks his face in a sinkful of ice. Pulls on his helmet. Kneels for a zen moment before getting in the car. Pulls onto the track. Regains the team’s lead in the 24 Hours of Daytona race. With savvy. Skill. Panache. And no bullshit. No time for bullshit. He finishes his shift behind the wheel. Tells the next driver, “Lose that lead and I’ll kill ya.” Goes back to bed. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” has been blaring the entire time, mixed exquisitely with the roar of the race. What is this? It’s ROCK ‘N ROLL, my friends. Savor the moment. Movies rarely juice your adrenaline like this. The rest of this movie may not juice your adrenaline like this.

Sonny takes his check and moves on. Hits the laundromat. There’s this thing here where he doesn’t wear matching socks. That’s his character – no-bullshit, no-matching-socks guy. Do we need to know more? Nah. But we do, when old compadre Ruben (Javier Bardem) strolls into the laundromat looking like a blowdried ocelot among the alleycats. He owns an F1 racing team, APXGP. He’s $350 million in the hole because APXGP not only hasn’t won a race, but it can’t crack the top 10. You don’t have to know all the ins and outs of auto racing – it might help, mind you – to know that’s sucky. Ruben wants his former racing teammate Sonny to come drive for him. Needle drop: Billy Squier’s “Stroke Me.” Of course. 

Gut response: Nah. But Sonny caves and shows up at APXGP’s gleaming HQ with its legion of technologists and pit-crew dogs and – gulp – PR handlers with the Instagrams and whatnot. You will not be surprised to learn that Sonny is not a technology guy. The team’s other driver, rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), straps on the monitors and electrodes and runs on fancy treadmills and does hand-to-eye-coordination drills on a highfalutin machine. Sonny? He puts on mismatched socks and sweatpants and goes for a jog. He bounces tennis balls. He does pullups and pushups. Joshua’s personal assistant – Sonny does not have a personal assistant, just to be crystal freaking clear – calls Sonny “Chuck Norris.” He oooooooozzzzesss manliness. Is it any wonder that APXGP’s technical director, Kate – the first woman in F1 ever in the position, mind you – and we shake our heads when we see brilliant actress Kerry Condon punch far below her weight class by looking up at Pitt like a half-naked servant at the feet of an emperor? You wouldn’t be able to resist either.

Sonny gets behind the wheel of APXGP’s car for the first time. Pushes it. Crashes it. Then offers his criticism of the build. Kate’s jaw drops. “He’s auditioning us,” Ruben insists. Hackles raise, feathers are ruffled, the cat gets pet the wrong way – all Sonny’s specialties. But something around here has to change, and he’s The Guy. The kid, Joshua, his gears are really grinding. He and Sonny clash for a while, and crash. Then that hot plate sitch cools down when Sonny strategically maneuvers the kid into 10th place for a race and earns APXGP its first point on the board. Maybe he can help plug holes in the sinking ship. Maybe he can earn the kid’s respect. Maybe he can do something about the sexual tension with Kate. If he can get over the nightmares about that crash 30 years ago. The one that ended his initial F1 career. The one signified by the scar along his lower spine, a scar we see often since Sonny isn’t always big on wearing a shirt. I guess if you were 60 and still carved out of wood like a fight clubber, you wouldn’t be big on wearing shirts either.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: F1 probably should join the shortlist of modern movies I refuse to watch unless I’m in a theater: Titanic, Gravity, and Top Gun: Maverick. It has much in common with Ford v Ferrari, which was thematically beefier, but not as whiz-bang thrilling. Also, Cars. It’s a lot like Cars.

Performance Worth Watching: With apologies to Tom Cruise, who’s 63 and still impressively shredded – I reviewed Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning recently and didn’t even mention his rampant shirtlessness. Not that Pitt does anything else that’s particularly special in F1, which will likely make a star out of the comedio-dramatically engaging Idris, and remind us of Condon’s magnetic charisma (see: The Banshees of Inisherin), and make us take note of how much Sarah Niles (Ted Lasso) brings to the film, playing Joshua’s mother.

Memorable Dialogue: “Just don’t ask me to give up position,” Sonny says, talking about racing and maybe sex but probably just racing.

Sex and Skin: Just a touch of PG-13 smoochyrookins.

Our Take: F1 is such a Brad Pitt movie, his persona defines how we should react to it: First, we throw a wearily bemused side-eye at the story, which makes the hack in me want to call the movie Formulaic 1. And then, we marvel at the technical construction of the product, here represented by the engineering feat that is Brad Pitt’s torso. The guy’s obviously got the balanced-macros thing down pat, and Kosinski – backed by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who knows a thing or 50 about Hollywood spectacles – relentlessly shows off the filmmaking equivalent of that. We could get into the technical shit – high-tech cameras capturing real-life F1 races inside and out of the cockpit, meticulous slam-bang editing, the arena-rock-show sound design – but it’s more fun to say it looks and sounds like every penny of two-to-three-hundred-million bucks, and you’ll just smell and ESP the level of detail that went into making this movie an exhilarating conglomeration of high-speed thrills. 

Granted, Kosinski struggles somewhat to maintain that buzz for two-and-a-half hours. When it wanes, he gets by on the signature Pitt vibes, the actor playing a Man Who Almost Has No Name, a cowboy-slash-samurai who wanders into town informed by wisdom and a bit of pain, and makes it a better place by the time he moseys on out. He doesn’t just work the gray areas of the race, he lives in the gray areas of life. It’s a metaphor, see. The way he races. It tells us something. Something meaningful. About an untethered existence. About the dynamic among lone wolves and tight packs. About not giving a single shit about the socks you wear. Whether he’s on soft tires or hard tires – well, that lost me. I don’t know enough about racing strategy to suss out subtext, but fans of the sport will have plenty of accuracies to praise and inaccuracies to nitpick. Knock yourselves out, dweebs. The rest of us will get by just fine thanks to the play-by-play “announcers” screaming explanations at us.

Pitt is the catalyst for the supporting cast, inspiring them to rally against Sonny, then come around to Sonny, then rally with Sonny. No surprises, but satisfying nonetheless. There’s a terrific moment in which Kate sits down to moderate the conflict between Sonny and Joshua, and she uses a poker game to break the ice (and I’m hereby stopping myself from making jokes about who gets poked, and by what). The screenplay is bog-standard, spiced up with quippy dialogue, but the cast works hard to make sure there’s some electrical charge to the scenes that aren’t on the racetrack. Not that we’re here for the talking scenes. We’re definitely here for the racing scenes, and I’ll be damned if they’re not stupefyingly great. 

Our Call: Turn down all the lights and turn up all the volume and make the best of it. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.