Formula One racing -- and just about every other sport -- offers abundant opportunities for brand promotion. Brand names adorn cars, drivers' suits, and racing venues. F1: The Movie, which immerses in the Formula One world, may not shatter box office records, but it may be the envy of folks who work placing products in movies. Identifiable brands seem natural enough because Formula One racing leans heavily on branding. Evidently, 2024's sponsorships reportedly topped $2 billion.
So, yes, among other things, you can keep count of the number of brands you'll notice in F1, a movie starring Brad Pitt and cars that look as if they belong on launch pads in sci-fi movies.
You'll find plenty of high-tech flourish in F1, but director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun Maverick) isn't offering a crash course on the use of technology in racing. He's engineering a major helping of IMAX-level footage that seems intended to give viewers a feel for what it's like to drive at speeds exceeding 230 miles per hour.
Kosinski builds F1 around a script that cashes in on Pitt's increasingly grizzled star power while relying on clichés about an underdog team that seeks to beat the odds. What? You thought I was going to say that the movie proved why most underdogs never have their day?
So is the movie any good?
F1 begins well enough with Pitt's Sonny Hayes notching a NASCAR win in Daytona. Sonny barely has time to celebrate when a Formula One bigwig and former racing pal (Javier Bardem) offers to fly him to London to join his losing APX team. APX badly needs a racing vet.
Initially reluctant, Sonny agrees. He heads to London where he meets Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a brash young teammate who's more confident than he has any right to be. Old-school Sonny and new-school Joshua compete to determine who'll lead the team.
So is the movie any good?
I'm getting there.
Once the rivalry is established, Kosinski introduces the APX team, which includes chief technical director Kate (Kerry Condon), presented as the first woman to hold such a post. She's also a potential romantic interest for Sonny.
The movie then marches through a variety of races including the Hungarian Grand Prix and the Belgian Grand Prix as it builds toward the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the movie's last Formula One Race, which arrives complete with a military flyover and a bit of been-there-done-that racing fatigue.
So is the movie any good? C'mon tell us already.
Well, the sharply edited racing sequences have visceral kick, although they start to feel repetitive. A few wrinkles in the subplot -- a move by a rogue APX board member (Tobias Menzies) to oust Javier's character -- add little.
The screenplay by Ehren Kruger and Kosinski plays it both ways with Condon's character. A staunchly independent woman in a man's world, Kate's still subject to Sonny's charms.
Pitt brings old-pro savvy to Sonny, a guy who insists he doesn't race for money. Despite injuries and failure to realize his big dream, he keeps pursuing the rare feeling that occurs for him when everything clicks behind the wheel, and, in his words, he's "flying."
Inside his helmet, Sonny almost looks like an afterthought while driving, a man whose reflexes might not be a match for the sensors lodged in the car's chassis. I half wondered whether racing could reach a point where drivers become obsolete. Cars could be "driven" by control-room techies. But wait ... Isn't that what video games are for?
Still, I found the technical aspects of modern racing intriguing and the movie's crashes left me gasping.
But I've dragged this on long enough. Is the movie any good?
The best I can say is that it's not bad, and it's scaled to entertain in an environment that captures some of the glamor and grit of Formula One racing.
Pitt is playing a type -- something like a loner cowboy in a motorized world -- but he does it well, and the rest of the cast hits the right notes, although Idris's character doesn't have much dimension and Bardem drifts in and out of the movie without gaining much of a foothold.
Both Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Ferrari (2023) were better movies. Why? Each had more compelling characters, even if the racing footage in those films wasn't as impressive as what F1 offers during its two-and-half hour running time.
So in the end, the movie stands as a big summer package that tends to falter during its non-racing pit stops. F1 may not plumb any depths, but Kosinski works in unapologetically bold strokes that make it clear that the movie knows what it's after -- large-scale thrills.