F1 The Movie is not a movie — it's a marketing exercise
F1's foray into Hollywood will satisfy neither hardcore fans nor a general audience.
Ahead of this year's Monaco Grand Prix, the drivers on the Formula One (F1) grid attended a special advance screening of the F1 movie.
When asked for his thoughts on the film, 18-year-old Italian rookie Kimi Antonelli, yet to be ground down by the PR machine, said honestly, "it was pretty cool. It was long..."
This was not exactly the most enthusiastic review the film's marketing team could have hoped for. Williams driver Carlos Sainz was more diplomatic: "I believe it will do very well for people who don't know anything about F1.”
That's the goal, of course. This film isn't trying to tell a 100% accurate racing story to please F1 fans. Following the mega success of the Netflix docuseries Drive To Survive, which is partially responsible for the sport’s viewership almost doubling between 2017 and 2021, F1® The Movie (don’t forget the registered trademark!) goes after a wider audience still, hoping to draw new viewers in with a flashy Hollywood production set within the Grand Prix calendar.
Charting the surprise success of the ailing, and entirely fictional, APXGP F1 team, the film has been injected with an impressive amount of cash from partners Apple TV (rumoured budget : $300 million) and granted unprecedented access by F1 itself to film during race weekends. It even boasts Lewis Hamilton himself as a producer to add authenticity to the racing scenes, which actors Brad Pitt and Damson Idris filmed by driving around for hours in modified Formula 2 cars.
It's all taken a lot of time and a lot of money, and like most Hollywood projects of this scale, the end result is impressively mediocre.
Perhaps I can't surmount an aversion to Brad Pitt, whose own children are disowning his surname after years of allegations of abuse. Either way his character, Sonny Hayes, is a typically annoying film star maverick, a washed-up former great drafted to save the team's fortunes by its desperate owner (Javier Bardem). That's right, Hayes is back for 'one last drive', and he somehow knows what to do better than everyone else despite not having driven in F1 for 30 years.
Surely at 60 Pitt is the wrong choice for this role. Yes, thanks to some plastic surgical trickery he looks twenty years younger, but there's no way that his character would ever be chosen, even as a last resort, to drive for any F1 team in real life. If I were Javier Bardem, I would want someone with slightly less brittle bones in my F1 seat.
Damson Idris, playing Pitt's younger and more volatile teammate, is much more charismatic and could easily have carried the film on his own, but maybe they felt like a big star was needed to draw in audiences. At the same time, Pitt is also a producer on the film and a longtime motorsports fan. The ridiculous leaps the film has to make to justify why Pitt, who is eligible for a senior railcard, is driving alongside Max Verstappen, make the film seem suspiciously like self-insert fanfiction.
Alongside various background team members, there are three (count them!) female characters in the film. These are:
Damson Idris' mum, who presumably has been watching her son drive for 15 years but for the audience's sake exists largely to ask stupid expository questions.
Kerry Condon , 'the first female technical director in F1’s history'. Entirely fictional of course, but this vague effort at women in STEM feminism is completely cheapened by the fact that her main role in the film is to giggle with Brad Pitt and inevitably get off with him.
A nervous young female mechanic, who messes up the pit stops twice and is generally considered to be incompetent by the team.
It's not exactly great representation for women in a sport historically known for grid girls and jokes about 'women drivers'. Bridgerton star Simone Ashley was also meant to star in the film but was cut last-minute, to the general disappointment of female fans online. In this film produced, written, and directed almost entirely by men, I doubt her presence would have made much difference.
Ultimately, none of the characters are compelling and the race scenes, accurate though they might be, lose all tension because you just don't care what happens to the people in the cars. Both Pitt and Idris suffer huge crashes but I felt nothing watching them fly over the barriers. In fact, at times I was actively gunning for irritating Sonny Hayes to make contact with Kevin Magnussen and fly off track.
Without basic character stuff locked down, the film just becomes one set piece after another. You really feel the two-and-a-half hour runtime by the end. Yet the racing scenes, while impressively crafted, are both too technical for non-specialists and too unrealistic for F1 fans, ultimately pleasing neither. Understanding tyre types, virtual safety cars, red flags, blue flags, and complex race strategy is key to the film's plot, and ‘commentary’ from Martin Brundle and David Croft explains this all laboriously. At the same time Sonny Hayes’s ‘game-changing’ strategy in the early races is to damage his car on purpose to hold up the race, costing his team hundreds of thousands in repairs, and if executed in real life would probably have earned him a race ban at least. I half-wondered at one point whether Pitt was going to go full Flavio Briatore and crash his car intentionally so Damson Idris could win.
Meanwhile, the film repeatedly stops to give cameos to team principals, including Toto Wolff and Guenther Steiner. Amusing for F1 fans, but a general viewer will just be wondering who on earth these people are, as they're introduced in a wink-wink way without explaining what they do. I have a feeling that non-fans will find the film bewildering — and boring.
This can't be helped by the decision to insert a fictional team alongside the likes of Red Bull and Ferrari, a bizarre and possibly fundamentally flawed choice. The brief moments we get of Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc putting on helmets or standing on the podium feel like cut scenes from a video game. Obviously, these drivers aren't about to act alongside the cast, so in every race it just feels like Pitt and Idris are driving against NPCs because there can be no inter-team rivalries, nor real interaction across the grid.
Why make up this underdog story about a fake team when much more interesting events have happened in F1 for real? There are so many potential films that they could make with greater potential than old man Brad Pitt. A sleazy Bernie Eccleston biopic tracking the commercialisation of F1 in the 80s. The bitter 2016 rivalry between childhood friends-turned-teammates-turned-enemies Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg. And the story of Brawn GP, 'the £1 F1 team', was right there!
But F1 The Movie does not exist to tell a compelling story. It does not have to. It is a marketing exercise designed to introduce new audiences gently to concepts such as 'Lando Norris' and 'medium tyres'. That’s why they chose to insert Brad Pitt awkwardly alongside the current grid rather than fictionalise everything, or tell a compelling true story from the past.
As the end credits kick in, a wailing guitar riff begins. It's hard rock, proper stuff, the kind you might bang your head to. Then the singer begins to warble over the track: it’s Ed Sheeran of all people, and his twee, unthreatening vocals completely take the teeth out of the song. This is his single 'Drive', produced for the F1 movie soundtrack, and I couldn't think of more appropriate promotional music for a film so disappointingly bland and unintentionally hilarious.
Nice review! I wasn’t planning to watch this movie since everything F1 these days feels overly commercial. I would’ve preferred if they went the Rush (2013) route instead.