"F1" - Star Power and Fast Cars is Never Enough

I’m gonna paint a picture here really quick. The year is 2011. You wake up at 9:00 A.M. on a Saturday morning, not a care in the world. You sluggishly walk into the kitchen to see your dad cooking a gluttonous breakfast feast in the kitchen. One of the following three movies is on the TV, no earlier than half over: Days of Thunder, Remember the Titans, or Glory Road. What do all three of these movies have in common? Jerry Bruckheimer sports movies, of course. You think to yourself, “man, I wonder if there’ll be any movies like this for ME to have on repeat on MY kitchen TV at 9 AM one day.” Enter F1, the most Jerry Bruckheimer sports movie to ever Jerry Bruckheimer. Whether or not that’s a compliment to the film is entirely up to your expectations, but at this point this formula (pun intended) has severely run out of gas for me (pun also intended).

Brad Pitt leads the film as Sonny Hayes, a race car driver asked by Javier Bardem’s Reuben to come out of a thirty year F1 hiatus for one last grand prix series. Together, with teammate, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) and team engineer, Kate (Kerry Condon) they must overcome their differences together to achieve the greatest underdog victory in racing history. 

I’m usually pretty dialed in when it comes to knowing runtimes of movies before I watch them, but F1 was one of the ones that slipped past me until I was sat down waiting for previews to end, but I just naturally assumed it would probably be just over two hours. So I was rather shocked when I checked to notice the runtime was set at 156 minutes. That shock eventually evolved into major concern when only an hour into the film was pacing itself as if it was getting ready to fall into the second act break immediately before the kickoff of the big third act extravaganza…with over 90 minutes left to go. 

Yes, the racing sequences are spectacular. The cutting and sound design is some of the finest you’ll see in an action sequence all year. It’s sharp, calculated, precise, and never disorienting. The film does a phenomenal job of ensuring you understand where everyone is geographically, and what each section of each race functions as. Unfortunately, in F1’s case you can have far too much of a good thing. The film could easily lose at least a half hour of its runtime, and the rinse/repeat nature of a large chunk of the second act felt dismissive of any real narrative consequences, and deeply inconsiderate to the development of the characters.

The film is visually impressive, and none of the performers give lackluster performances, but the only character I felt anything for was Joshua Pearce, and unfortunately it was far more annoyance than likability. He’s supposed to be a cocky douchebag, which Damson Idris achieved, but all of the other redeemable qualities the film asks you to latch on to, disappears as quickly as they enter. 

Despite the high-quality cutting in the racing sequences, the editing in most other scenes feels far too fast, and jarring, lacking any sort of rhythm or identifiable pace. Editing is far better when it’s unnoticeable, and there were multiple shot-reverse-shot casual scenes here that took me out of it enough to start counting how many angle changes there were. 

There is nothing about F1 that is offensively bad, and it’s already pretty clear that I’m in the minority opinion here. Tons of people are going to get a lot out of this movie, but from where I’m standing, the film feels as though it was made solely as an excuse to make loud cars go vroom vroom as opposed to having a real solid narrative, that just so happened to have those cool things in it too. Without a team like Cruise/McQuarrie backing up projects like this, the soul required to make something this formulaic work well is almost entirely absent.