Title: F1: The Movie
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Cast: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, and Javier Bardem
Where: In theatres near you
Rating: 3.5 stars
There’s something perversely comforting about a film that burns rubber on the track of predictability yet somehow manages to keep its engine running with charm and sheer spectacle. F1: The Movie, Joseph Kosinski’s sleek, swaggering return to blockbuster territory, is one such cinematic machine—familiar as a checkered flag, loud as a paddock brawl, and smooth as Brad Pitt’s jawline in golden-hour lighting.
Pitt, as Sonny Hayes—a once-great driver now baked in regret and rock music—revs up the heart of the film. He’s less a character and more a myth on wheels: grizzled, grinning, and improbably tanned. We meet him waking in a van at Daytona, cueing Zeppelin, and blazing laps like he never left. Enter Ruben (Javier Bardem) an old friend with a struggling team (he is silkier than a champagne-drenched pit pass), a hot-headed protégé, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a side of romantic tension with Kate (Kerry Condon), and a dash of corporate villainy in the form of Guthrie (Tobias Menzies), and you have yourself a pitstop tour of every sports movie trope known to man.
And yet, you go with it. Kosinski, ever the architect of aesthetic excess, doesn’t so much direct as choreograph, framing Pitt like a monument to American Cool and peppering the film with enough lens flare and throttle-cam footage to make a GoPro blush. The racing sequences are undeniably the film’s crown jewel—visceral, glossy, and edited within an inch of their life. For anyone susceptible to the seduction of horsepower and high-stakes drama, F1 is a high-octane siren song.
Still, the film’s storytelling sticks rigidly to the tarmac. Ehren Kruger’s script dutifully ticks boxes: reluctant comeback, intergenerational rivalry, emotional redemption, and the requisite wise-beyond-her-rim-width female lead. Pitt and Idris share credible chemistry if not quite a combustible one, and Condon manages to rise above the usual romantic sidekick shtick with the steeliness of someone who knows her way around an engine block. Bardem purrs through the role like he’s secretly auditioning for a Monte Carlo heist film, and Menzies, to his credit, plays the corporate shark with enough restraint not to chew through the chrome trim.
Despite the presence of three significant female characters, the film remains largely a testosterone-fuelled ballet. It nods to inclusivity without ever truly shifting gears, and while the film is studded with impressive technical detail—thanks in part to F1 champion Lewis Hamilton’s behind-the-scenes input—it’s never interested in unsettling its audience or surprising its fans. This is cinematic comfort food served in carbon fibre bowls.
Hans Zimmer’s score pulses beneath it all, soaring and simmering as needed, while the needle drops—some inspired, others algorithmically predictable—try to inject cultural coolness. The script, however, never quite outruns its genre roots. It’s Top Gun: Maverick on wheels, without the altitude.
In the end, F1 is a highly polished, breathless ride that doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. It coasts on Pitt’s ageless charisma, Kosinski’s visual muscle, and the intoxicating fantasy that talent, grit, and the right team can still win the race. Just don’t expect it to reinvent the wheel.
