In the wake of the mammoth success of the 1986 hit Top Gun, producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer decided to gather together two of its key elements—director Tony Scott and star Tom Cruise—to take the formula established by that project and apply it to a story set within the world of auto racing—a milieu that allowed for both flashy machinery racing around at high speeds and plenty of room for companies to pay for brand association with what was almost certainly going to be another mega-hit. Unfortunately, even though the resulting film, Days of Thunder, was essentially Top Gun On Wheels, something went wrong along the way and despite the massive amount of hype surrounding its release, it proved to be a flop at the box-office, especially in regards to its exorbitant screw-the-budget cost, and demonstrated that the seemingly unstoppable talents behind it were not infallible after all.
Although Bruckheimer would continue to have any number of successes in the subsequent years (Simpson and Scott would both pass away during that time and I am assuming you know what has become of Cruise), it seems as if the failure of Days of Thunder must have continued to gnaw at him as well. In the wake of the massive success of the 2022 legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick, one of the first genuine blockbusters of the post-COVID era, Bruckheimer seems to have elected to try to revisit that dark corner of his professional history, hopefully with a happier ending, by recruiting the director of that film, Joseph Kosinski (whose flashy-but-empty filmography suggest what Tony Scott’s might have been like without the occasionally interesting outlier like The Hunger, True Romance and Domino), and Brad Pitt, one of the very few screen entities working today to come close to equaling Cruise’s star wattage, to take the formula established by that project and apply it to another story set within the world of auto racing with a massive price tag and astonishing levels of pre-release hype. While I suspect that this version, dubbed F1: The Movie, probably won’t suffer the same ignominious fate at the box-office that Days of Thunder did, the unfortunate fact is that it, much like the earlier film, it is little more than an excuse for big stars to get a chance to fuck around in expensive cars at race tracks around the world and get paid exorbitant amounts of money for doing so—nice work if you can get it, I suppose, but not so much fun for those who only get to watch the aftermath.
The film is centered around the Formula One racing team owned by one-time racer turned corporate bigwig Ruben (Javier Bardem), much to the consternation of the other members of the board. You can hardly blame them because while their top driver, rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), has plenty of raw talent, he has neither the experience nor teaching to help him make much use of it and as a result, the losing streak has continued to the point where, thanks to some contractual fine point, if they don’t win at least one race by the end of the current season, the board will forced him to sell the team outright. In desperation, Ruben calls upon Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a former colleague from his racing days who never quite lived up to his great promise (thanks in part to a tragic accident seen repeatedly in flashbacks throughout) and who is now working as a low-rent driver-for-hire.
Sonny eventually agrees to the offer and turns up as the team is preparing for another race, much to the consternation of Joshua, who resents this apparent has-been friend of the owner being foisted on him like some kind of charity case. Sonny isn’t thrilled either, seeing his teammate as an arrogant punk who may have a massive social media following and plenty of endorsements but no actual victories of which to speak. The conflict eventually spills onto the racetrack, where Sonny’s aggressive, rule-bending driving style helps to slowly spur the team out of its rut but which at the same time threatens to do them both harm at the same time. Will the two eventually find a way of finding some kind of common ground? Will Sonny figure out a way of sealing the deal with team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), who is equally determined to design the perfect vehicle and to not fall into bed with any of the guys on the team? Will everything come down to the final must-win race of the season and, if so, will Sonny and Joshua be able to eke out a victory at long last? If you have any doubts regarding the answers of any of these questions, you may be the ideal potential viewer of F1. Hell, you could even be the screenwriter.
Some of you may think that this might sound like a fairly slender plot, especially for a movie clocking in at 156 minutes and reportedly costing somewhere between $200-300 million dollars and some of you would be correct in that observation. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger—whose name on a script alone is enough to send shivers up the spines of most film fans (if you ever want to underscore the general uselessness of the Academy Awards, consider the fact that he was actually nominated for his work on Top Gun: Maverick)—tries to make up for that by throwing in any number of side characters and subplots but never bothers to do anything with them to make them interesting or appealing. To be fair, the script doesn’t hit the ludicrous excesses of the likes of Days of Thunder—there is no equivalent here to the scene in which Tom Cruise explained race strategy utilizing a couple of sugar packets and Nicole Kidman’s leg—but it doesn’t do much of anything else either. Neither of the main characters is especially intriguing—Joshua is the standard arrogant young punk who is all about the branding and social media but needs to heed the advice of the older teammate if he is to have any hope of making it and Sonny becomes infinitely less interesting once you finally realize that his greatest gift as a racer, at least as depicted on screen, is basically being a colossal rule-skating asshole.
The other problem is that Kruger is never able to find a solution for the key hurdle that anyone writing a narrative around auto racing has to face—the inescapable fact that it is an activity that, at least from a dramatic standpoint, is not particularly interesting. To be fair, those with a pre-existing interest in the sport may get a little more out of it than I did but my problem is that it doesn’t really do anything to try to illuminate newcomers so that they have a better idea of what is going on and, maybe, develop some kind of vested interest in the proceedings. The film seems to be setting up such an approach by introducing Kate and her determination to design a car that should shave even a couple of precious seconds off of the racing time but then more or less abandons it. Instead, we get lots of stuff about the machinations of some of the members of Ruben’s board to try to snake the team out from him if he cannot get that contractural obligation victory and all this does is underscore that the sport of racing, at least in the Formula One format, is basically a game for the super-rich to toss away millions of their dollars, which kind of renders the underdog aspect moot.
Of course, one doesn’t go to a film like F1 for outmoded concepts like plot and characters. They are going almost entirely to experience, however vicariously, the sensation of hurtling across raceways at dizzying speeds (not to mention the occasional ensuing carnage) via the massive images and the overamped sound that have you practically shaking in your seats at certain points in the way that Top Gun: Maverick did. To that extent, the film does work on some fundamental level in providing those visceral thrills thanks to the combination of the cinematography by Claudio Miranda and the whiplash editing from Stephen Mirrione and Patrick J. Smith (not surprisingly, Miranda and Smith both worked on Top Gun: Maverick as well). And yet, while the visual style is undeniably slick and commanding, all of that it merely on the surface level—the film never figures out a way of making it into something genuinely interesting in the way that John Frankenheimer and his army of technicians did with Grand Prix back in 1966 by bringing a formal beauty and kinetic energy to the racing sequences that not only made you feel as if you were in the midst of a race but also allowed you to find a sort of order amidst the chaos that allowed those sequences to be more than just mere sensation machines.
Is F1 better than Days of Thunder? I suppose so, but a.) that is saying more about how legendarily terrible that movie was than about how good this one is and b.) it isn’t that much better—if I were to do a ranking of movie revolving around auto racing with Grand Prix near the top and Days of Thunder near the bottom, it would probably land somewhere between Stroker Ace and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. It is basically a mechanism designed to present enough in the way of screeching tires, crashing cars, empty platitudes, star swagger and product placements to give the viewers that they have experienced something, even if that something is more akin to a video of a theme park ride than an actual movie in the end. If that is all that you want, then F1 will almost certainly satisfy you. On the other hand, if you are under the delusion that if a movie costs this much money and employs so many considerable talents on both sides of the camera, it should ultimately prove to be more than just a load of empty cinematic calories, you may quickly grow annoyed with it, especially once it becomes obvious that not even the likes of Pitt, Condon and Bardem can do much of anything with the collection of cliches they are working with here. In the end, all that F1 really accomplishes is to prove that weak sauce served at 175 m.p.h. is, in the end, still weak sauce.