Movie magic happened in 2022 when director Joseph Kosinski and writer Ehren Kruger teamed up for Top Gun: Maverick, a spectacular legacy sequel that recorded a stunning $1.5 billion worldwide at the box office.
Sadly, the trick can’t be repeated as movie magic does not happen with Kosinski and Kruger’s reunion F1: The Movie.
A two-and-a-half hour advertisement for Formula 1, right down to a character saying they “binged all of Drive to Survive“, F1: The Movie attempts to blend the classic sports underdog story with a realistic and immersive F1 experience for both fans and non-fans alike.
It at least succeeds with the racing scenes which are technically impressive, firmly putting you in the driving seat as it’s lights out and away we go. In these sequences, you completely understand why Apple wanted a big-screen release before it heads to Apple TV+.
But ironically, F1: The Movie ends up not having that much driving in it which, as a result, will leave F1 fans frustrated and non-fans still wondering what all the fuss is about.
One of the movie’s main problems stems from its choice of focus. A stronger underdog story could have been told with Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), APXGP’s cocky hotshot rookie who perhaps over the course of the movie would mature and finally win his first race.
But no, the focus of F1: The Movie is largely on Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) instead. Less a has-been and “more a never-was” as APXGP technical director Kate (Kerry Condon) puts it, Sonny was once F1’s most-promising driver until an accident in 1993 put an end to his F1 career.
Sonny’s former teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem) is now the owner of APXGP and with zero points, let alone wins, in two-and-a-half years, Ruben turns to Sonny to save his team by reclaiming old glories and racing to victory.
The problem, for audiences at least, is that Sonny is an unlikeable and arrogant lead character. Rather than learning the error of his ways, he forces the rest of the team to follow his maverick ways and embrace chaos including, but not limited to, deliberately crashing multiple times in one race.
For a sports underdog story to work, you need to have to want the characters to succeed. It’s something that never happens with Sonny who resolutely remains a bit of a dick, so it’s hard to care whether he gets his moment of triumph. The script tries to throw a last-minute Hail Mary with tragedy in Sonny’s past to force the feeling, but it’s too little, too late.
Consequently, F1: The Movie is an empty spectacle. You can appreciate the craft on display in the driving sequences, but it’s hard to be fully invested when you don’t care about the characters in them. The thrills are on screen, yet rarely translate to the audience.
F1 fans might also end up feeling short-changed by how much driving that the movie actually contains. While it takes place over the course of nine races, a lot of those are brief sections of the various races and three of them are dealt with in one of the movie’s several montage. (If anything, F1: The Movie has more montage action than driving action.)
The movie course-corrects in the final act with the lengthiest race section, but is otherwise more concerned with various sub-plots. There’s a classic last-minute ‘boo hiss’ villain twist, a needless romance, drama in the pit crew and hinted-at tension between Joshua and his manager Cashman (Samson Kayo).
Had these subplots expanded the various characters and made them memorable supporting roles, then you could forgive the extended runtime. Instead, they largely just revolve around how they relate to Sonny, even with Joshua’s arc, and end up bloating the runtime without really adding anything to the movie itself.
When the climactic moment of F1: The Movie comes, you should be exhilarated and wanting to cheer like in any good sports movie. Instead, you’ll likely just be feeling relief that it the chequered flag has finally come.
F1: The Movie is released in UK cinemas on 25 June and in US cinemas on 27 June.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
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