What’s summer without a big, action-packed car racing movie? Well, we won’t have to find out this year, because producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Gone in 60 Seconds), director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), and heartthrob Brad Pitt (Bullet Train) have teamed up to bring us F1® The Movie.
F1® The Movie stars Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a talented-yet-troubled aging race car driver who is approached by his old teammate/friend Ruben (Javier Bardem from the Dune movies) to drive for his APX Gran Prix team (pronounced “Apex”). Sonny is brought in as a last-ditch effort to save his friend’s bottom-place team, and the shake-up works – the renegade driver causes just the right amount of tension within the camp for them to actually start climbing in the rankings.
The script for F1 The Movie was written by Kosinski and Ehren Kruger (who also worked with Kosinski on Top Gun: Maverick), and it’s really a tale of two movies. There’s the car racing movie, which is visceral and exhilarating, and then there’s the between-the-races, soap opera-y movie that is a bit less exciting. It’s comparable to Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, where scenes in which the movie is engaged in the sport that it’s about are thrilling, but for the rest of the time, the audience is just waiting for the thrills to come back.
Again, the actual scenes of the races are incredible. Cinematographer Caludio Miranda (another Top Gun: Maverick veteran) puts the audience right in the car and on the track so it can almost feel the wind of the competitors as they speed by. Even the scenes with the pit crew are pulse-pounding. With help from some killer Skywalker Sound audio design and an incredible score from Hans Zimmer (yet another Top Gun: Maverick guy), there may not be a better movie to get the blood pumping this summer.
Another interesting thing about the racing scenes is that there’s a bit of humor to them. Sonny was brought in to help the team win, and he’s got some unconventional ways of doing it. One of these ways is causing complete and total chaos on the track, doing things that are just barely within the rules of racing. Some of it helps him, some of it helps his teammate driver Joshua Pearce (Snowfall’s Damson Idris), but none of it makes him any friends outside of his own camp. And most of it is hysterical.
Which brings us to the between-races segments of the movie. While they serve the purpose of letting the audience catch its breath between action scenes, after a while, they seem unnecessary. At first, the drama is palpable, with obvious tension building between Sonny and J.P., (Sonny’s nickname for Joshua, which is given over J.P.’s own objections, which only helps to feed the rivalry). There are also some shenanigans where Ruben is being forced out as owner. And then, there are some questions and official challenges regarding how legal some of the car’s modifications are. And all this non-race stuff is engaging, to a point. But after a while, the off-track drama feels forced and manufactured, and not at all surprising.
The biggest example of the disappointing off-track drama is a tiny spoiler, so skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a fairly predictable narrative trope. The lead tech on the team is a capable, intelligent, strong woman named Kate (Kerry Condon from The Banshees of Inisherin). Of course, at one point, she is made a typical love interest for Sonny, which kind of throws the whole movie into Standard Archetype territory. Just when you think you’ve got a kick-ass, independent female role model, they hook her up with the Hollywood Leading Man. Hey, but at least they didn’t make J.P. hook up with the team’s only female pit crew worker (Callie Cooke from Cheaters), right?
Okay, so now that we’ve got that out of the way. F1® The Movie is a respectable summer blockbuster. It’s got enough chills, thrills, and spills to earn its cinematic stripes. But it likely won’t be considered a classic of any genre. It’s the definition of disposable entertainment. Immensely fun while in the theater but forgotten as soon as the next Big Movie comes along.
GRADE: B
Rating: PG-13 for strong language and action
Running Time: 2 hours 35 minutes
Release Date: June 27, 2025
