6.5

Brad Pitt’s Racing Drama F1 Looks Good While Going in Circles

By Jesse Hassenger  |  June 27, 2025 | 10:30am
Movies Reviews joseph kosinski
Brad Pitt’s Racing Drama F1 Looks Good While Going in Circles
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Brad Pitt is just about the same age as Tom Cruise. That doesn’t seem right, because Pitt became a star a full decade after Cruise did, and even more than Cruise appeared preternaturally youthful well into his 40s, to the point where at some point, the de-aging effects of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button were borderline invisible. But Pitt is in his early 60s, which seems like the most succinct explanation for F1, transparently a get-me-one-of-those model on Cruise’s later-career megahit Top Gun: Maverick, only F1 isn’t sequelizing a beloved movie from Pitt’s actual youth. (Cool World: Frank Harris does not appear to be forthcoming.) It’s more of a sequel to Pitt’s youth itself.

To throw this Formula One-themed anti-retirement party, Pitt has recruited the Top Gun sequel’s director, Joseph Kosinski; one of its writers, Ehren Kruger; and its most famous non-Cruise producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, for a story about the reckless but gifted driver Sonny Hayes recruited to drive for an F1 team tenuously owned by Ruben (Javier Bardem). Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), Sonny’s hotshot younger teammate, chafes at the old man (“Chuck Norris” is one of his more devastating nicknames) and his ideas about how to push them to victory and avoid Ruben losing his ownership altogether. Kate (Kerry Condon), the team’s technical director, must figure out how to cut through the male egos as she designs upgrades to their cars and looks Sonny up and down (even if Idris is far closer to her age in real life).

Pretty boilerplate stuff, though the sports-movie structure gives it a little more direction than those vague military-as-self-actualization narratives of the Top Gun movies. On the other hand, the role of Sonny is just as prone to self-flattery as Cruise’s Maverick, only less successful at it. It throws back to Pitt’s ’90s mystique – the character, too, is referred to as a relic of that decade – which was also before some major leaps he made as an actor as he grew into his career. Maybe his double feature of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Babylon served as a farewell to his version of Old Hollywood; those roles played to his strengths in fleshed-out ways even when Tarantino was flattering his star. Over the past few years, he’s mostly been regressing into some faux-Zen version of his past self as a Gen-X Robert Redford.

If taking up fake-but-sorta-real racecar driving in his early 60s seems less patently insane than the stunts Cruise has performed over the past decade of impossible missions, Pitt also appears more self-conscious issuing rough-and-tumble straight-talk wisdom. It’s a different form of vanity, and a less endearing one. You almost want Sonny to just admit that he’s a lowlife and be done with it, rather than nobly accepting his checks and fancy hotel rooms while keeping open the possibility that he can opt into pretending to be poor and go back to living in a van. Then again, if it seems to push the boundaries of belief that Sonny’s past of gambling and annulled marriages would be fodder for scandal, well, be grateful that there’s not also a dead friend hanging over the proceedings for his motivational trauma.

If F1 spent any more time with Sonny – and it spends quite a lot – it might threaten to turn insufferable. The bright side is that as-is, it’s hard to lament the character study that might have been. (This character, at least, hardly seems worth the effort.) Hiring Kosinski may have been an ego play, but the man knows how to rigorously cover the ins and outs of dangerous vehicular stunts, turning them into adrenalized procedurals. Beyond the technical exactitude of the racing scenes (which are impressive and, per an F1 fan who accompanied me to the screening, quite accurate to how real racing footage looks and feels), the sport gives Sonny the opportunity to serve as both coach and clutch player from the field. Those shifting roles, where so much relies on split-second decisions and coordination, add some extra dimension to the many racing sequences.

The overall structure of the movie is just race, break for argument, race, occasional montage, race some more; it gets a steady rhythm going but it’s not exactly white-knuckle suspense, either. Kosinski’s imagery has the same precision of his work on Top Gun: Maverick, though compared to the biodigital jazz of Tron: Legacy, his abilities feel a little hemmed in by all of this tasteful clarity. He sharpens the digital-overcast look of so many blockbusters to a fine point, then refuses to wield it; when he briefly indulges in split-screen, it’s like something more actively retro is struggling to break through. As well-made as the movie is, at two and a half hours it feels like Kosinski is, to a degree, grinding it out. To the movie’s credit, that only really becomes clear in the final stretch, where a series of distended goodbyes make clear just how little emotion there is to be wrung from this entertaining efficiency. F1 does more or less what it’s supposed to do; maybe that’s why Brad Pitt is so dispiritingly convincing driving in circles.

Director: Joseph Kosinski
Writer: Ehren Kruger
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem, Tobias Menzies
Release Date: June 27, 2025
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