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‘F1’ Review: Brad Pitt Swaggers Through a Formula One Drama That’s All Surface Excitement
Joseph Kosinski builds a high-powered movie out of Bruckheimer clichés, but that wouldn't matter if the races were as dramatic as they are flashy.
As the majestic bombast of “Whole Lotta Love” floods the soundtrack, Sonny Hayes ( Brad Pitt), who was once a rising Formula One star and is now a freelance has-been (but he’s still got the right stuff), stirs himself from a sleepy stupor, plunging his face into an ice bath and sauntering out of the cruddy van he lives in to walk a few steps over to the team pit stop of the 24-hour Daytona marathon race, which is already unfolding beneath a starry sky. It was launched half a century ago in “Grand Prix” (1966), which featured thrilling Formula One races through the European countryside, the camera hurtling forward at road’s-eye view, all of it surrounded by a stuffy bloated piece of late-studio-system claptrap. Joseph Kosinski, the director of “F1,” is the high-tech nostalgist who made “Top Gun: Maverick,” and he knows how to take that need-for-speed doom-saturated narcotic aesthetic and ratchet it up to maximum rock ‘n’ roll overdrive.
Or read this on Variety
