Why do you open your film with hard rock anthem “Whole Lotta Love?” If you’re slick new blockbuster F1, you do it first to capture the strutting energy of the music, as engines roar and the trackside crowd screams for Brad Pitt as racing driver Sonny Hayes. Then the viewer realises there is another reason. The musical choice has been made, in fact, to prove the movie is loud enough to drown out Led Zeppelin. Elsewhere, there are points of near silence and moments of playfulness. Also, this is the kind of film where the makers will be disappointed if you don’t leave lightly deafened.
And yet for all the thunderous speed ahead, the story is set up with the calm efficiency of an airport travelator. We meet the grizzled and wry Sonny after 30 years out of Formula 1, driving every other kind of hair-raising vehicle. Then an old pal, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), recruits him as a Hail Mary for the comically failing team he owns. Soon, Hayes is butting heads with cocksure young teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Shortly after that, we are at his first comeback race at Silverstone. (If the premise is far-fetched, the backdrop of tracks and drivers is pointedly authentic. Watch for a plot twist at Monza and a string of oddly silent cameos from co-producer Lewis Hamilton.)
Director Joseph Kosinski made Top Gun: Maverick, from whose model F1’s race scenes take their cue. The movie is so loud because we spend much of it in the cockpit. The action judders with state-of-the-art tech and the occasional nostalgic gesture: it gladdened my heart to see a split screen. At Imax scale, the adrenalin flows. (I can’t vouch for that on a laptop.)
But the faces of the two films tell different stories. Top Gun: Maverick was defined by Tom Cruise’s earnest, dutiful squint. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes as a clone of his roguish stuntman Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: a hyper-masculine sage, living out of a Scooby-Doo camper van after bad marriages and bankruptcies. For all the wealth of the sport he has returned to, Sonny isn’t doing this for the cash — which is presumably why Pitt too is making the movie for free.
Just kidding. A passing clue to the size of the project comes when Cervantes mourns being $350mn in the red — not far from the $300mn F1 is reported to have cost. Led Zep don’t come cheap. (And the sheer volume of product placement is transfixing: Bardem spends so long idling in front of a T-Mobile logo, you might take him for a cardboard cut-out.)
But the story also plays at more modest scale. The rivalry between Hayes and Pearce rolls on, flecked by the humour that can happen when giant egos clash. The movie is generous enough to make room for smart performances from Idris and Kerry Condon, playing Cervantes’s technical director. Early on, she also gets to propose the movie’s countermotion: that Sonny’s self-appointed role as “no-bullshit cowboy” is redundant in the team sport that is Formula 1.
Well, yes and no. Though the story salutes democracy, Hayes and Pitt are also first among equals. A neat joke manages to be made about the character’s handsomeness; Pitt’s charisma glues the movie together; and Sonny’s seasoned bag of tricks always beats raw speed. Among the film’s engineering challenges is giving a thrill to anyone with a ticket, even those without much interest in motor racing, like vegans in a steakhouse. But the best seat is reserved for the male viewer perhaps around the age of Pitt, 61, who may also feel they could still teach the world a thing or two — if the world would just stop looking at TikTok.
If wish fulfilment is the movie’s strength, a weak spot is a lack of crunch to the drama. Casting Team Cervantes as hapless losers is fun, but the movie drags when it tries to heighten the stakes with a villain. A still bigger risk is the mention of Ayrton Senna — killed at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994, his very name an eternal reminder of the dangers of the sport. Creditably, though, the movie weighs the reference right.
So when the noise kicks back in, it can be hard not to smile. You suspect Kosinski has found some rhymes between blockbuster movie making and Formula 1: another epic spectacle reliant on teamwork, rare talents and a vast stack of cash. Plucked from fantasy, Sonny Hayes himself would no doubt see the movie as bull. Still, even he might grudgingly admire the sheer confidence of its driving.
★★★★☆
In cinemas from June 25