F1: The Movie review: "a crowd-pleasing, feel-good blockbuster"

You could argue that, as a sport, every race in the Formula One calendar is its own self-contained movie. The locations are mostly glamorous, the cast of characters is varied and handsome, there are heroes and villains, and action aplenty. That’s the vibe that was so ingeniously mined by Netflix’s Drive to Survive, the ultra-glossy quasi-reality show turbocharging the sport’s appeal, particularly in America, for years the F1 refusenik.

F1: The Movie takes all that equity and fires it into the stratosphere. This is F1’s unabashed love letter to itself, a licensed product in a similar vein to the wildly successful Barbie movie. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you’ll know that the film’s cast and crew inserted themselves into the F1 world championship during 2023 and ’24, lining up on the grid at Silverstone, Monza and Abu Dhabi, amongst others, and generally doing a remarkable job of blurring real life with fantasy. Was that Brad Pitt in the media pen high-fiving Fernando Alonso after a Grand Prix? Yes it was.

Pitt, one of the few actors left who can “open” a movie, plays Sonny Hayes, a journeyman racer we first meet as he contests the Daytona 24 Hours for an old mate. He lives in a converted 50-year old Ford Econoline van, a free spirit and gambler who races on a ‘one and done’ basis for the thrill of it, and refuses to accept the winner’s Rolex. Nice shorthand.

But when his old teammate from way back when, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), suddenly reappears, an emotional back story is swiftly sketched in. Hayes was a youthful F1 ace, destined for greatness, until he suffered a career- and almost life-ending accident during a race. We see the footage in flashback, and if it looks a lot like Lotus F1 driver Martin Donnelly’s horrific crash at Jerez in 1990, that’s because it is. (Donnelly gets a prominent thank you in the closing credits, and rightly so.)

Cervantes is now the owner of ailing F1 team, Apex GP, with creditors closing in and a shifty investor called Banning (an amusingly oily Tobias Menzies) scheming in the shadows. Ruben needs an experienced old hand to steady the ship and mentor talented but hot-headed newcomer, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).

This is not, it must be said, a wildly original premise. Pitt is better looking and much younger than Obi Wan Kenobi or indeed Yoda, but the story arc follows the age-old pattern. Old-timer arrives to general disbelief, dispenses wisdom and gnarly one-liners, and proceeds to show the nay-sayers how it should be done. Hayes, quickly identified by Apex GP’s technical director Kate McKenna (a stand-out performance from the brilliant Kerry Condon) as a ‘lone wolf’, turns out to be more of a team player than he first appears. Not to mention something of an aerodynamics wizard.

He’s also prone to the sort of maverick driving style that would give today’s race stewards chronic heart palpitations

He’s also prone to the sort of maverick – but of course – driving style that would give today’s race stewards chronic heart palpitations. It’s all highly entertaining provided you don’t drill too deeply into it. It’s a rare blockbuster movie indeed in which tyre compounds and the redesign of a racing car’s floor provide major plot pivots. We get to see wind tunnels and driver-in-loop simulators at work, and gatecrash team briefings. There’s real heart to the story but also wilfully cheesy chunks of dialogue. Look, you’ve just got to go with it.

F1: The Movie is directed by Joseph Kosinski (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, Top Gun: Maverick), a petrol-head and F1 fan, which helps, and a masterful technician of a film-maker, which helps even more. Pitt and his co-star Idris, a charismatic match for the Hollywood A-lister, spent 18 months on and off learning how to drive single-seaters. The Apex F1 cars are actually converted F2 cars, equipped with 360-degree mini-IMAX quality cameras. So the close-ups and long shots of the actors’ faces are for real, the action rendered with gut-punch impact by DoP, Claudio Miranda. You can almost feel the cornering Gs, and will find yourself wincing instinctively when the drivers brake.

Our friends at Sky F1 do a great job, no question, but Hollywood clearly still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve. As you’d hope, given the film’s rumoured $300m budget. (Apple has bankrolled most of it, sparking rumours of a possible bid for the F1 broadcasting rights.)

And so to the tricky question of who this film is really for. There are shades of The Colour of Money here, Martin Scorsese’s 1986 masterpiece starring Paul Newman and a young Tom Cruise. But explaining a pool-room hustle is easier than deciphering an F1 race, an expositional task which falls here to Sky F1’s redoubtable David Croft and Martin Brundle. F1 newbies might still find themselves floundering, while experts will naturally find ways of spluttering indignantly into their popcorn. There are also cameos from a variety of familiar pit-lane faces, who clearly couldn’t resist their big screen moment.

Lewis Hamilton, whose company Dawn Apollo was one of the producing partners, personally ensured as much factual and technical accuracy as could reasonably be expected in a mega-budget fictional tale. F1: The Movie hits some high notes, a crowd-pleasing, feel-good blockbuster with old-school heroes to root for. Resistance, ultimately, is futile.

F1: The Movie opens in cinemas nationwide on 25 June