With its officially-licensed F1 movie, Liberty Media hopes to repeat the success it enjoyed with Drive to Survive on the big screen.
As long-term F1 fans have come to understand, that means a product pitched squarely at the mainstream. This is logical for a film intended as a promotional vehicle.
Even so, many attached to the project, including co-producer Lewis Hamilton, have been at pains to stress their commitment to authenticity. So can “F1: The Movie” successfully appeal to a mainstream cinema audience while catering for existing motorsport fans eager to see a full-scale Hollywood production based on F1?
Early reviews gave a mixed picture, skewing positive but within a range of two to four stars. Several also made comments along the lines of: ‘F1 fans will love it, but…’ In other words, the opposite of what Liberty Media wants from this venture.
The scale of F1’s ambition can hardly be faulted. Tech giant Apple put up between 200 and 300 million dollars, reports claim. Brad Pitt provides megastar energy. The team behind 2022 blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, including director Joseph Kosinski, tackled the complex project using state-of-the-art filming kit.
Formula 1 provided an incredible degree of access to events on the grand prix calendar. This was not quite “unprecedented” as they claimed – John Frankenheimer got their first with “Grand Prix” – but that film is almost as old as Pitt himself.
Pitt was born 18 years before Fernando Alonso and is three years older than anyone who has ever taken the start for a grand prix. Inevitably the first question ‘F1: The Movie’ faces is whether he is therefore believable as a racing driver.
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His character, Sonny Hayes, originally left F1 after a crash in 1993, and therefore would have to be 50 today (the character’s age is not stated). So it’s less a question of whether Pitt can ‘get away’ with playing that much younger than himself and more a matter of whether a driver in their sixth decade could still cut it in F1. Alonso is well on his way towards finding out…
Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) recruits former racing rival Hayes to his struggling team APX for the final nine races of the season. He is tasked with training up their rookie and ensuring the team’s survival by bagging a win before the season is over. The story arcs from there on are, for want of a better word, formulaic.
Pitt is not an uncontroversial choice of leading star. The film revolves around his character; the others are largely defined by their relationships to him. His rapport with Cervantes is believable but the same can’t be said for others.
His team mate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) follows an obvious path of grudgingly gaining respect for the hired hand. He also plays up to the media in a manner which is incomprehensible at times.
Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), APX GP’s technical director, does serve a narrative function besides falling for Hayes’ charms. But credulity snaps when she responds to his urging to “build the car for combat” by asking: “How am I supposed to make that safe?”
The main attraction of films like this is the racing action, and here “F1: The Movie” does not disappoint. It was crafted through a combination of real racing footage from the 2023 and 2024 seasons plus footage of the actors and various stunt drivers at the wheel of Formula 2 cars adapted with F1-esque bodywork.
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The combined effect is utterly convincing. Six decades of technological advances since ‘Grand Prix’ have allowed the filmmakers to blend real racing action with genuine footage in a seamless fashion.
While mainstream audiences can gorge on the Maverick-esque visuals, dedicated F1 followers can also entertain themselves by spotting which real moments were transformed for the film. At its best moments, “F1: The Movie” can satisfy both audiences, but it has too many flaws to be a completely satisfying experience for either.
The greatest irony of “F1: The Movie” is that the most riveting racing doesn’t feature a single grand prix car. The film peaks early with its opening sequence shot at the Daytona 24 Hours. The wheel-to-wheel racing and late-braking moves, plus the visual feast of blazing brakes and glowing headlights at night set the bar high. Later F1 scenes revolving around tyre choices, exploitation of arcane rules and even talk of the wretched “DRS train” can’t measure up to this.
The film is weakest where the racing and the plot intersect. Hayes’ value to APX is less his speed, which is pretty much taken for granted from the off, and more his ability to call unorthodox strategies from the cockpit. Expect much eye-rolling from F1 strategists.
Kosinski crafts his film for an audience which may know nothing about F1, which is fine. But he also seems to think they won’t understand anything which isn’t pointed out to them by two different characters in quick succession. If good storytelling is ‘show, don’t tell’, this is ‘show, then tell, then have David Croft and Martin Brundle say it again’.
Like Mercedes on a cool day, there are times when “F1: The Movie” comes good. There are moments of real humour which bring relief from the endless exposition and more predictable exchanges by the hospital bed or at the poker table. However contrived the plot, the technical feat of the race footage is genuinely impressive. And Hamilton deserves credit for making good on his desire to present a vision of a more diverse series than F1 is today.
But “F1: The Movie” offers a vision of the championship which is obsessed with the banality of regulations and stewards’ decisions. The real joy of motor sport is largely absent until the final lap.
This is a world where gambling invariably trumps driving ability. Where races are won less by skill than exploiting obscure areas of the rule book. Up on the big screen, Liberty Media’s vision of F1 looks awfully small.
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RaceFans rating
“F1: The Movie” opens in cinemas in most territories today and in North America on Friday 27th June.
Motorsport film reviews
- “Le Mans ’66” (aka “Ford v Ferrari)” reviewed (2019)
- “Rapid Response” reviewed (2019)
- 1: Life on the Limit – the RaceFans review (2014)
- “Rush” reviewed (2013)
- “Senna” – the Ayrton Senna movie reviewed (2010)
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