F1 is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we’d really have something. But few will complain. We know what we’re getting. We’re getting Brad Pitt easing his abs into tubs of ice water and Brad Pitt striding toward the camera in long shot, twice, exactly the way Tom Cruise did in Top Gun: Maverick.

Fundamentally, it’s a movie about how to get in and out of cars, and how to perfect a grizzled poseur’s look of middle-distance staring into preordained destinies somewhere up in the sky. Driver Sonny Hayes, Pitt’s character, survived a near-death crash 30 years earlier. He has lived a nomadic existence ever since, leaving a trail of exes and broken hearts wherever he stopped long enough to check his brakes and change the oil.

The screenplay by Ehren Kruger (co-writer on Top Gun: Maverick) drops hints about Sonny’s gambling addict past, and his stint as a New York City cab driver, and that’s a movie I’d see right now. A bitter, risk-prone Formula 1 flameout, scaring the living hell out of one arrogant Wall Street trader or nightclubbing socialite after another? Yes, please.

Sonny’s solitary, nomadic life gets a jolt from old pal Ruben (Javier Bardem, also very good at the getting-out-of-car-while-middle-distance-staring-thing). Three hundred and fifty million dollars in debt, he owns an F1 team in dire need of an experienced driver behind the wheel, someone to mentor the reckless but promising young rookie Joshua (Damson Idris). Joshua doesn’t take to the fossil in their midst, dissing Sonny with insults like “old man”, “old timer”, and “Mr. 1990s,” and you know that sort of disrespect will come back to teach him a lesson.

F1 travels from Daytona Beach to Abu Dhabi as the team’s chances improve, in between additional near-fatal crashes and battles of the ego, plus a budding romance between Sonny and the team’s technical director, Kate, played by Kerry Condon. She’s a breath of fresh air in this slick, two and half hours of hero redemption.

Director Joseph Kosinski clearly took the impressive aerial reshoots (real and simulated) he oversaw in Maverick as inspiration for the track-level work on F1, and there is a lot of it. The IMAX-immersive, behind-the-wheel perspectives blend with real racing footage shot from many other perspectives, along with the digital effects, always in the name of velocity. Sonny is a brutal tactician but divinely inspired toward greatness, per the script, a driver more about ramming speed than playing nice.

The results hang together well enough as a $200-plus million showcase for Pitt, and for Kosinski’s action facility.  F1 does, however, follow in the tradition of glossy, big-budget racing movies determined to spin their wheels, dramatically speaking, 20 or 30 minutes longer than they have gas in the tank.

Also, there’s a peculiar misstep in how Kosinski and editor Stephen Mirrione chop up the non-racing sequences into micro-collisions of talking heads, cutting at dangerously high speed, back and forth. It’s one way to generate urgency, but is it the right way? You long to return to the racing stuff. And my favourite footage: the movie’s impressively varied depictions of frenzied pit stops, three to nine seconds in duration. In an artfully packaged movie offering more teamwork lessons per lap than any racing film before it, nothing in F1 beats those pit stops — purely cinematic blurs of speed, noise and collaborative purpose.

8/10 Another, please.

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.