Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, an ageing racing driver with a chequered past who gets one final chance at the chequered flag – the one that goes down when you win a Formula One race.
He missed out on the big one decades ago thanks to a bad crash on the Monaco circuit. Since then he’s had a string of failed marriages, lives in a van and drifts from one backwoods racing circuit to the next, earning just enough to feed his whiskey and gambling habits.
His old friend and one-time racing partner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) catches up with him after he’s done a scorching leg of the Daytona 24-hour endurance race. Ruben is now managing new F1 team APXGP – ‘Apex’ for short – which hasn’t won any races yet. He just knows Sonny’s still got the goods and asks him to sign on to the team, which includes promising rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) and a crack crew of designers and mechanics, among them hard-headed but sexy technical director Kate McKenna, played by Irish actress Kerry Condon.
Sonny initially says no, but he somehow gets his mojo back and turns up in time for the Silverstone Grand Prix in the UK.
He’s rusty, he’s arrogant, he’s full of bluster, he’s not good at taking instructions, he clashes with his co-driver. He thinks Pearce is a cocky upstart with a lot to learn; Pearce calls him ‘old man’.
The movie follows him and the Apex team round the F1 circuit. The team badly needs a win. Sonny badly needs redemption. Their fortunes wax and wane as they take in Hungary, Monza, Spa, Zandvoort, Suzuka, Mexico City, Abu Dhabi and Las Vegas. I kinda hoped they might make it to my home town and do the Albert Park circuit, but they didn’t. There are 24 Formula One circuits altogether and this is not a documentary after all.
I’m not into Formula 1 and I’d never watch it on TV, but the feature film format enables the filmmakers to go to town on the sheer spectacle that surrounds F1 events: the crowds, the music, the hype, the danger and thrills of the speeding cars. All the racing footage is real. The fictitious bits involving the Apex crew are seamlessly interwoven with real events shot during the F1 seasons of 2023 and 24. I loved the cutaways to the aerial graphics that display on screens throughout the racing, showing us the fast-moving relative positions of the drivers. Our two lads Sonny and Josh are in there among Verstappen, Norris, Hamilton, Piastri and the rest, and when you consider that Brad Pitt and Damson Idris did all their own driving, aided and mentored by Lewis Hamilton, it lends this Hollywood conceit a certain respectability.
The rivalry between teammates Sonny and Josh is a central theme, and as it unfolded on screen I was put in mind of the real-life rivalry between Oscar Piastri and his McLaren teammate Llando Norris, a situation I have vaguely registered in recent years and months just as a consumer of daily news. As a non-aficionado of F1 I have to admit the movie brought the human drama of it vividly to life.
There’s a love story of sorts between Sonny and Kate, and it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that they don’t overplay or soppify it and keep the focus on the enthralling sporting drama instead.
That said, I didn’t like F1 The Movie as much as I liked Rush, the 2013 movie about the rivalry between James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. It had the advantage of being a true story, and of being half an hour shorter. With a runtime of 2 hours and 35 minutes F1 The Movie pushed the outer limits of my tolerance for noisy vroom-vroom and roaring crowds and headbanging music.
Rush also had the considerable advantage of having Chris Hemsworth as one of the leads, not that the presence of Brad Pitt isn’t a good reason to go and see F1. Hemsworth may be in pole position in the Grand Prix of my heart (ahem) but like him, Pitt keeps on improving with age, and if he’s had work, as a (jealous?) friend of mine sneeringly suggested, it was damned good work and he wears it well.