Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris and Kerry Condon
Directed by: Joseph Kosinski
Rated: PG-13
Running Time: 156 minutes
Warner Bros. Pictures
Our Score: 2.5 out of 5 Stars
One of the key reasons “Top Gun: Maverick” resonated with audiences was its use of practical effects. You could feel every jolt, every turn, every pulse-pounding second in the cockpit. “F1 The Movie” offers a similar thrill, dropping viewers into the high-stakes world of Formula 1 racing with visceral, immersive action sequences. If you’ve ever found racing dull on TV, F1 may be the antidote. Although you may still find watching racing at home dull once you leave the theater, but I digress. On the track, “F1” is a perfect symphony of tension and speed. Everything off the track is where things falter.
The comparisons to Maverick are hard to avoid as “F1” clearly follows the same blueprint: stunning set pieces surrounding a story about aging, redemption, growth, and legacy. Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a retired F1 driver forced out of the sport after a near-fatal crash. Years later, he’s pulled back into the game by former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who needs Sonny to help steer his struggling team, APXGP, through the season alongside rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
But while Maverick benefited from emotional investment and nostalgia, “F1” has to stand on its own—and it doesn’t quite get there. Pitt is reliably cool and watchable, but his laid-back charm lacks the sharp emotional edge Tom Cruise brought to his return as “Maverick.” And despite strong performances across the board, the film struggles to make any of its characters, aside from three, feel essential. It’s overcrowded, with too many subplots and too few payoffs, drowning out the film’s emotional core.
The racing scenes are breathtaking—seriously some of the best you’ll see all year—but the pacing of the story sputters. At times, it feels like a condensed TV series, or a script that lost track of itself. Fortunately, Kerry Condon adds some much-needed depth as Pitt’s love interest and team engineer. She brings a steely, scientific sensibility that grounds the film, and her chemistry with Pitt works. Bardem also elevates every scene he’s in, but unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them. Too much time is spent on side characters who don’t need speaking roles; just background presence, and the film loses momentum every time it wanders away from its main players.
I walked into “F1” with little interest and found myself wanting it to be great. It has the makings of a classic summer blockbuster: high energy, big stakes, and enough sensory overload to make you forget the real world for a while. And in that sense, it succeeds. But when the engines quiet down and you’re left with the people behind the wheel, there just isn’t enough there to hold on to. “F1” may offer the thrill of the race, but it never fully wins you over.