High-octane blockbuster 'F1' is a crowd-pleasing throwback

“You’d think it’s the ‘90s again out there,” shouts an announcer about halfway through director Joseph Kosinski’s hugely entertaining Formula One racing drama. He’s referring to the return of Brad Pitt’s Sonny Hayes, a one-time contender who flamed out 30 years ago and, after decades in obscurity, is back leading a ragtag underdog team on a championship run. But the broadcaster might as well be talking about the movie itself, a crowd-pleasing throwback to the glossy, high-octane blockbusters of producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s heyday. “F1” uses cutting-edge IMAX camera technology to put us behind the wheel of these racecars speeding around the track at 220 mph, but the storytelling remains defiantly old-school.

I was all-in from the boomer rock riffs setting the stage for Pitt’s iconic entrance. His Sonny Hayes is a gloriously absurd character tailored to the star’s sandy-haired swagger. A professional cardsharp who lives out of his van, he’s a nomad drifting from race to race, a beach bum samurai with a need for speed. Sonny’s tracked down by his old racing rival Ruben (Javier Bardem) and reluctantly recruited to drive with the latter’s floundering Formula One team, which is currently languishing at the back of the pack thanks to green young lead driver Joshua (Damson Idris) and a car that can’t compete with the Ferraris and McLarens.

You will be awarded no points for guessing that Pitt and his young protégé butt heads and hate each other’s guts before developing a grudging respect that blossoms into something like friendship before the final race is won. This is not a movie designed to surprise you. Instead, the pleasures of the film lie in the confidence with which it hits every familiar beat, moving gracefully between set-pieces and montages while doodling fun character flourishes in the margins of tried and true formulas. There’s something comforting about how completely in command Kosinski and company are of their cliches.

Since the team’s car isn’t quite up to snuff yet — their nickname for it is unprintable here — Sonny has to eke out advantages for them on the track in other ways, pushing against the outer edge of regulations without quite crossing the line into cheating. It’s a perfect application of Pitt’s rapscallion charisma, selling us on the character’s strategically poor sportsmanship with his wry, “aw shucks” smile. (The studio sent us a strongly-worded memo that the official title of this film is “F1®: The Movie” and must be printed as such, with the copyright symbol,  in reviews. So I’m doing what Sonny would do and ignoring it.)

He’s exasperating to his teammates and makes it worse by being right most of the time. Sonny has a fun, combatively flirty chemistry with the team’s technical director. She’s played by Kerry Condon, who in “The Banshees of Inisherin” proved invaluable at cutting through the blowhard boys’ club and gives us a more glammed-up take on the same task here. I love that she’s a racecar designer who rides her bike to work.

Because they’ve worked together a couple of times and look distractingly alike, Pitt is often compared to Robert Redford. But while watching “F1,” it dawned on me that he’s had a far closer career trajectory to Redford’s co-star and pal Paul Newman. Both began as fussy, often overly mannered actors trying too hard to prove they were more than their otherworldly good looks. But then in their 50s, Newman and Pitt learned how to relax on camera and aged into the coolest, most comfortable dudes onscreen. They’ve got similar knockabout senses of humor, with Pitt’s trademark, open-mouthed half-smirk recalling Newman’s tickled irreverence in “Slap Shot.” (His best performance, or at least his most fun.)

Bruckheimer and Kosinski’s previous picture together, “Top Gun: Maverick,” was a bona fide masterpiece of the blockbuster form, and “F1” perhaps too liberally lifts a number of elements from its storyline. (You can also spot scenes from “Bull Durham,” “Any Given Sunday,” “Moneyball” and many more.) But what can I say? As a guy who recently turned 50 with a mountain of regrets, I have no idea why these movies about the gifted washout who’s been banging around his profession for decades finally getting his last-ditch shot at redemption and glory seem to speak to me so strongly. Everyone’s taste is a mystery, I guess.

Kosinski is one of the increasingly rare big-ticket directors who understands how movie stars work, and in an era when most summer releases are indifferently photographed CGI slop shot in Atlanta warehouses, he knows how to invest his films with a tactile, larger-than-life sense of scale. The globe-trotting production got permission to shoot during an actual F1 season, grabbing footage during the downtime of real races, integrating the actors into the kinds of crowds and locations we scarcely see in post-pandemic cinema, where so many movies feel hermetically sealed off from their surroundings. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda (who also shot “Maverick”) frames every character like they’ve never looked cooler in their lives.

Still, this might be a little too smooth of a ride for its own good. Thrilling as these race sequences may be — the ground-level equivalent of the face-melting aerial acrobatics in Kosinski’s “Top Gun” sequel  — their outcomes are never in any serious doubt. We know we’re safe from anything like the grisly, gasp-inducing final stretch of Michael Mann’s criminally underseen “Ferrari,” which brought the sport’s inherent death drive home to roost. “F1” is a breezy blockbuster, channeling the laid-back charms of its star with such cool competence and attention to craft that you too might feel like it’s the ‘90s again out there.

“F1 (copyright symbol): The Movie” is now in theaters.