A Two-Hour Plus Pile-Up

As far as feature-length commercials go F1: THE MOVIE is not bad…it just fails to fully deliver the goods

I wouldn’t blame you if after coming out of a screening of F1: The Movie you thought that this was the Days of Thunder sequel you were waiting and hoping for (assuming, of course, that you are a fan of that 1990 film). Both were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, both were put together by the creative teams behind Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, both are scored by Hans Zimmer, and both feel like extended commercials for auto racing. Both also feature a who’s who of race car drivers themselves or a facsimile. One stars Tom Cruise, the other his Interview with a Vampire castmate Brad Pitt. Granted, Days of Thunder benefitted from the penmanship of Robert Towne, he of Chinatown fame, who butted heads with Bruckheimer, co-producer Don Simpson and director Tony Scott during the film’s production, which means there is more meat to its bones than there is on F1: The Movie. It also helps that Days of Heaven finds inspiration on real drivers and incidents to tell its story while in F1: The Movie, as written by Joseph Kosinski and Ehren Kruger and directed by Kosinski, plot, story and characterization are used as placeholders for the more than ten races depicted in the film. 

Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) is the proverbial sports has-been. In the 90s, he was considered by many to be the future of Formula One until an accident in the racetrack abruptly ended his career. He now lives in a van, trying to pay his gambling debts by driving a cab or taking the odd racing job here and there, like helping a team win the 24 Hours of Daytona as the movie opens. We know where the film’s headed: Hayes will soon get a second shot at redemption. It comes in the guise of his former racecar mate Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem, having the time of his life with a role that has very little to offer), the now owner of the worst team in Formula One, APXGP (Apex for short). He needs to turn the fortunes of his company around before he is sacked by the board and believes that only Sonny can help him, his team, and the young, cocky upstart driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the team’s face, beat the odds. And so it’s off to London for Sonny.

Not content to ape Days of Thunder as well as every other car racing film ever made since 1966’s Grand Prix, Kruger and Kosinski model the rivalry between Sonny and Joshua on the characters played by Jamie Foxx and Dennis Quaid in Oliver Stone’s 1989 football epic Any Given Sunday: the arrogant new black promise who is far more interested in endorsements, magazine covers and viral moments against the white veteran who can teach him a thing or two because he sees a younger version of himself in Joshua. You know that, by the end, the young ‘un will learn to work as part of a team and the high-speed sensei will pass the baton to him. And that is the case here: to Jason, Sonny looks 80 and washed-out while he is the future. For Sonny…well, he is pretty aloof about this arrogant kid at first. He is there to help his best friend win and will make sure he uses every single tool provided by APXGP to do so, from designing a new racing vehicle to making the whole staff go jogging with him in the early morning hours to get them to perform as a team.

The cast is full of one-dimensional characters that seem like an afterthought. We have the great Kerry Condon playing Kate McKenna, Apex’s technical director and the first woman in that role in F1 history; Sonny and Kate soon begin to flirt and it’s not before long that both end up in bed. Then we have the great Tobias Menzies (Game of Thrones, The Crown) playing the obligatory British villain as the smooth-talking Banning whose one dastardly act is just another box to be checked in the film’s plot. There’s also Bernadette (Sarah Niles from Ted Lasso) as Joshua’s overprotective mother and Shea Wigham in an equally thankless role in that opening Daytona race (frankly, I was expecting him to fly off to London with Sonny…he is Shea Wigham, for God’s sake!). 

And what about the races? They are all impressively shot and edited with Pitt and Idris doing a significant amount of the driving. Cameras are attached to them to show the races from their point of view; cameras are attached to the cockpit aimed at them to show how the maneuver these cars and everything the race throws at them. But there is a sameness to these dozen car races that rob them of the sense of drama that recent, and far superior, car racing films as Ron Howard’s Rush, James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari and Michael Mann’s expectation-breaking Ferrari had. There is no sense of what is at stake here for these drivers and of what victory will mean for them as they drive at high speed in these fragile vehicles. The race sequences may feel immersive and are eardrum-shattering loud but there is no memorable moment that sticks in your mind such as the shocking recreation of the 1957 Mille Miglia race that cost the lives of 11 people, including spectators, in Ferrari or the exhilaration of that final race in Ford v Ferrari.

And while Pitt may conquer us with his swagger, cool demeanor, charm and cowboy-like delivery of his very manlike one sentence ripostes (for this is a movie where a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do), nothing can beat Christian Bale’s performance as the obsessively driven and at times stubborn British race car driver Ken Miles in Ford v Ferrari. Yes, it’s an apples and orange comparison but if you look at James Mangold’s film closely, you can see how F1: The Movie even borrows some of that film’s convention and how much more convincing and on point Mangold’s film is about corporate interference in a dangerous sport.

In an article celebrating Days of Thunder’s 20th anniversary, AP Auto Racing Driver Jenna Fryer recalled how neither NASCAR nor Towne were happy with the race sequences, although it did introduce NASCAR to a wider audience (keep that in mind, as Chicago becomes home to NASCAR next weekend for a third year in a row). F1: The Movie is so harmless, so safe, I suspect Formula One will have no objections to this extended commercial disguised as a motion picture.