REVIEW:
F1 is not a good movie. In fact, it is downright dull and boring, which is a real shame for a race car movie that is supposed to be all about speed. Let’s start with this, the director, Joseph Kosinski is not a very good director. He has made three high profile movies before this… Oblivion, Tron Legacy, and Top Gun: Maverick. Two of those three, Oblivion and Tron Legacy, were pretty bad. And both of them had intriguing premises and should have been so much better. In the case of Tron Legacy, I tried again and again to like it, since the setup and opening five minutes were just so cool. But no matter how hard I tried, the movie always fell apart by the second half. Now, Kosinski did make one good movie, and that’s Top Gun: Maverick, but how much of that had to do with him and how much of it was about nostalgia for the first movie, which is the smash hit of the eighties? In other words, anyone could have directed that movie and it would have been good.
So Kosinski is riding on the coat tails of that movie with this one. And there’s no doubt about it, he’s trying to continue with the nostalgia of Cruise. You see, Cruise starred in the race car movie, Days of Thunder. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, (just like F1 is. Cruise even acted with Brad Pitt before, in Interview with the Vampire. Let’s put it this way… Cruise showed up the premier of F1 and I was asking myself who he was showing up to support. Was it Pitt from their acting days together, Bruckheimer from producing days, or Kosinski from directing days. The answer was probably all three. And the point is that this movie was almost made to look like a Days of Thunder sequel, in the wake of the Top Gun sequel. And it’s totally not.
What F1 is, is a very technical and lifeless movie. This is a movie that cares about things like the specific type of tires a car uses, or the amount of time it takes for a pit crew to change the tires, or how wide the lanes of the track are in certain parts, and how that affects the drivers. If we were actually in this business, this would all be interesting. It’s the nitty gritty of how everything works. But as a casual movie goer and fan of fun, fast moving, and entertaining flicks, this one definitely does not make the cut.
To get into it for a bit, Brad Pitt plays an aging driver. He’s called upon by a guy he used to work with and race against (played by Javier Bardem,) to fill a spot on Bardem’s team that is now open. This means he will race alongside a young partner who also represents Bardem’s team. And so the two of them train together and build up their bond with each other. But they also spend most of the movie arguing or crashing into each other, or trying to screw each other up during the race. The big problem is, this movie isn’t willing to take any chances. Everything is predictable and tamed down. So, when we get a poker scene, for example, and one character wins, but the other character never turns over his cards, you can predict that the one who didn’t turn his cards over actually had the winning cards and just didn’t want to show them (he wants to let the other guy win. It’s painfully obvious. And what makes it even dumber is the instructor who is like, “I’m not gonna sleep with you, you just lost to a pari of jacks.” And then the player turns over his cards to reveal he actually did have the winning cards, cut to he and the instructor sleeping together. In other words, he decision of whether or not to sleep with him was entirely based on whether he won the hand or not.
Another example comes when there is a huge car fire with one of the players trapped inside the car for a number of minutes. The entire car is engulfed in flames, and they finally get the body out. There’s not a doubt in my mind that this guy should be dead. And if he were, the movie would get major props for being gutsy and doing something unpredictable, that most people never saw coming. Kind of like the Dark Knight killing off a female character that you never thought would die. Only this movie doesn’t do that. it doesn’t take the gutsy move. Instead, the character recovers and races again, and all is good and fine, as if nothing happened.
So let those examples, as well as how boring it gets seeing the cars just go around the track again and again, over and over again thougout the movie, with little to no variation, be enough to explain why this movie is so lifeless. Now, there are semi-interesting plot points from time to time, like a financer who is trying to sabotage the team because if they lose, he can sell it for more money. But even that, the best storyline in the movie, is something we’ve seen before, many times over (such as in Major League with the woman baseball team owner of the Cleveland Indians, who wanted her team to lose.) So there really is nothing new or interesting or exciting here. It’s just that kind of dull, boring movie.