Film Review: F1 (The Movie)

Not just bad, terrible. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

F1 The Movie - Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer, Dir: Joseph Kosinski. Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Xavier Bardem, 156 minutes, Colour.

Full disclosure: I’m a fan of F1, engineering and cars in general. I’m also a huge fan of the movies, despite its continuing capacity for disappointment. That aside for the moment, to prepare ourselves for F1 The Movie (the family are also F1 fans) we watched several seasons of Gossip Girl to maintain a low bar for plotting and acting so that we weren’t entering the cinema with unrealistically high expectations. After all, this is a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, so forewarned is forearmed: It’s Eye Candy, not Brain Candy and we entered the auditorium with that firmly in mind, so I will also not comment on any of the massive technical and on-track inconsistencies.

For the most part the film was mildly enjoyable, albeit a longer version of Netflix’s Strive to Survive but with all the complexity of character and technical challenges taken out. The racing sequences were pretty good, adding an on-track excitement to F1 that it all too often doesn’t have - races can be dull, even I will admit that - and the cameos of real drivers was not just enjoyable, but a tradition of motor racing movies down the years as the integration of stock footage with real was, back then, the only way to bring race atmosphere to screen.

Structurally, I found this movie not just lacking, but disturbing. For starters, the hero of the story should emphatically not have been Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes, who moves from the start of the film to the end without any change in his character arc at all - he begins as a selfish washed up wheel-for-hire and ends up as … a selfish washed up wheel-for-hire. This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing as the Loner does often bring about change in others, or helps others to a higher purpose, or freedom. Mad Max or Jack Reacher are fairly good examples of this, and Eastwood exemplified this in his early Westerns - the idea of a Principled Loner, lost unto past conflicts, making things right unto others before moving on. Not so with Sonny Hayes, whose primary motive as a loner is not to help others, but himself - and then move on.

To do this Sonny Hayes starts off by demonstrating that without a level playing field the only winning strategy is, of course, to cheat - by deliberately making contact with other cars to force an advantage. In the good old days of responsible filmmaking this was the tactics of the antagonist where the hero of the story battled and defeated people like Sonny Hayes by luck, talent and support from a dedicated team - I’m thinking 1968’s The Love Bug here, where the driver of a sentient Volkswagen Beetle overcomes the conniving and cheating David Tomlinson to win the climatic El Dorado race. More recently in Pixars Cars, protagonist Lightning McQueen has to overcome his selfish and arrogant persona and learn to be a team player and trust in the judgment of others, with once again a Sonny Hayes character as the villain, here personified in Chick Hicks.

The reason I chose these two films to make the point is that both are ostensibly for children, and I think purport to show a sound moral code in that you don’t get ahead by cheating or being an asshole and were both more than twenty years ago, in a world perhaps more different to the one we are in now, with a more robust social code and contract. Mind you, given one film is about a race-winning VW Beetle and the other set in a world of anthropomorphic cars, both scenarios seem actually plausible when compared to 61-year-old Sonny Hayes’ ability to place a losing car on an F1 Podium.

Obviously an ability to suspend disbelief is not just desirable but a perquisite for any film featuring a matinee idol now a decade past the half century, but I think it was the politics of acceptable and, worse, unquestioned and unchallenged cheating that I found quite insidious, and I couldn’t help but thinking of how the Tories got Boris Johnson on board to figure out BREXIT. Teresa May couldn’t do it fairly or legally, so they brought in someone who was used to not only giving fair play a wide birth, but was contemptuous of those who trusted in institutions. Carefully ignored in the movie was the FIA, the body who govern motorsport and whose purpose it is to see fair play. In the real world, Sonny Hayes would have been disqualified for his dangerous on-track antics, and the team too. But that didn’t suit the politics of the film, or how the filmmakers presumably think how real life should work: To Sonny Hayes, institutions are there to be ignored. They get in the way of what you want: success at all costs.

Ultimately, one wondered what the Sonny Hayes character was actually doing there or what he wanted. It wasn’t the win because he refused the trophy and laconically walked away with the vapid and meaningless ‘maybe we’ll meet further down the road’ and Hayes also decided that a quick tumble with -fictionally at least - the most impressive woman in F1 was a far more meaningful conquest to him than a relationship, and Hayes ‘many failed marriages and numerous bankruptcies’ did not really suggest failing at all, but just the modern equivalent of a winner’s natural and tacitly impressive arc to success. The technical director of APX-GP was, while we are on this subject, excellently played by Kerry Condon who brought a hard edge to what it takes to survive in F1, but also a likeable charm. She, like many other members of the cast struggled to convey some sense of what their character was about, presumably as the script offered few clues.

The person who should have been the hero of this story and which could have been achieved with no diminishment of the film or of Pitt star power was Josh Pearce played by Damson Idris whose character would have had similar struggles to the real Life Lewis Hamilton. None of this was looked at in any depth, as all roads in this movie led to one place: the massive ego of Brad Pitt, who, one assumes, was instrumental in deciding where the movie should go, and what it should be about, and who should emerge as the winner: Himself.

If Brad Pitt had taken a single page out of Sonny Hayes’ playbook, he would have given the screen time, credit and fictional win to Idris before walking away from the red carpet to play repertory in quarter-empty theatres in Scranton. As it was, that was never once in the offing: Brad Pitt wanted to stand on a make-believe podium receiving make-believe adulation on top of his real-life adulation while the real-life hero that Idris was meant to be portraying drove a better race but then -dang- crashed out on the final lap, leaving Pitt to win.

Muse on that for a moment: Both Hamilton and Pearce, both who have struggled - one fictionally, the other for real, to gain a seat at the height of their chosen career, crash out to allow Hayes to win. Get out of the way losers, Brad’s in town. I thought the point of the Nihilist drifter who drops into people lives and allows the underdog to succeed. Not any more, apparently. Winning, as we can see, is everything - and the all powerful white multi millionaire who has nothing more to prove gets the trophy when he doesn’t actually even want it, secures funding for his multimillionaire buddy and moves on straight away. The new nihilist drifter in Hollywood movies doesn’t intervene to elevate others or for justice - they do it for their own ego, and cash for their mates.

I admit that my expectations, while low were actually still too high, but F1 The Movie really does confirm my belief that action movies are made for undiscerning 14-year-olds by grown-ups with the mind of undiscerning 14-year-olds. While the adage that art and theatre and film holds a mirror up to life, the reflection I see is not the parts of us that make us better people, but the dangerous trope that the winning strategy is to cheat. Success and money and power is all that ultimately matters and the little guy, the one who actually struggled, you are free to tread on as you stride to an undeserved win.

And that’s why sports - and that includes F1 - does not reflect this, as F1 the Movie seems to think. To be the best at anything in this world you need dedication, years of practice, luck and a loyal team supporting you. The movie should have been about Lewis Hamilton, the working class kid from Stevenage whose Dad worked two jobs and endured racist taunts to achieve World Championship status through hard work and dedication - now that’s a story.

Edit 2/7/25: Pixar Cars comment added, my thanks to Harry One O’cat

Jasper Fforde debuted on the NYT best seller list with ‘The Eyre Affair’ in 2001. Since then he has written sixteen other novels which some people say are amusing, satirical, and diverting. For balance, others say they are nothing of the sort. More info at www.jasperfforde.com

Latest publication: ‘Red Side Story’ USA/Canada and UK, 2024.

Next Publication: ‘Dark Reading Matter’ UK and Canada/USA, 2026

My substack contains satire, comedy, thoughts, movie memories and more - it’s free, too. If you like what you read, why not subscribe?