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Movie review: F1: The Movie [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-11
“It’s not about the money,” Brad Pitt says as his character Sonny Hayes in F1: The Movie. Then what is it about? That’s a question that’s asked in the movie but not given an explicit answer. And it’s a question that needs to be asked of the movie’s producers.
If it’s not about the product placement — Apple, Oracle, Red Bull, T-Mobile, to name just four — then is it about proving that Hollywood still has use for an aging man as a lead actor, rather than as a main character’s parent? But sixty-something Tom Cruise has already proven that, doing his final reckoning as Ethan Hunt in the latest Mission: Impossible movie, almost thirty years after the first one.
F1: The Movie is a celebration of the white male loner who knows everything but still has a lot to learn about teamwork. Sonny (Pitt) was a promising Formula One driver until an unfortunate accident on the track thirty years ago turned him off the sport, but not off racing in general. Now he lives in his van, going wherever there is some kind of race other than Formula One, or where there’s a casino to gamble at.
Sonny is a jerk. Early on we see how angry another driver is after a stock car race Sonny wins with technically legal but very unsportsmanlike maneuvers. Sonny is not perturbed by the other driver in the least, but he’s ready to fight dirty, ready to strike a presumably unarmed man with a big wrench out of some mechanic’s toolbox.
I don’t think I can invest emotionally in such a man's story. I thought about walking out of the movie. And I actually did walk out. I went to the concessions to buy popcorn and pop. I was intending to go to whatever screen was showing Jurassic World Rebirth.
But here’s the thing: the cineplex I had chosen to go to, the MJR Universal in Warren, north of Detroit, does not label the screens the way AMC theaters do. The screens at the MJR Universal are numbered, but there’s no marquee telling you the title of the movie playing nor what time it started.
So, even if I recognized John Williams’s theme for Jurassic Park, I would have had few clues with which to figure out how far along the movie has come along its running time, whereas with a Star Wars movie the music alone would give me a pretty good idea.
Maybe MJR has a much stronger policy against screen hopping that AMC, such that even if you don’t see any movie in its entirety, you are still expected to buy a ticket for each screen you go to. Though MJR prices concessions more reasonably than AMC, with the popcorn and pop combo I nevertheless considered myself fully committed to the movie theater experience. I might as well finish F1, I decided.
It wasn’t hard to catch up, even though I surely missed some important exposition. Ruben (Javier Bardem) has a losing Formula One team based in England. He needs to turn it around before it gets taken away from him. Ruben’s solution is to add Sonny to the team. After some hesitation, Sonny agrees to go to London to meet the team.
There are two blonde women on the team, and you will immediately know which of them will have sex with Sonny later in the movie: technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon). This movie could have passed the Bechdel test with just a little bit of effort. Have Kate talk to the other woman on the team about a carburetor or something like that.
And that reminded me of Worth It or Woke, the movie review website that tells you which movies are worth the ticket price because they’re not woke. Reviewer James Carrick concludes in his review that F1 is a good movie while at the same time pointing out some fairly serious flaws, such as that besides Sonny “neither the rest of the characters nor the plot or subplots are particularly dynamic or original.” But hey, as long as it’s not woke!
The snowflake critic is also triggered by the different accents, mostly British and German, but he’s not racist, you see, because those accents “combined with the sounds of racing in the background, [result in that] some dialogue gets lost.” So it’s a legitimate critique of the audio engineering, not hatred of those who don’t speak English with a proper ‘Murican accent.
As soon as Sonny joins the team, Sonny starts implementing unorthodox strategies that push colleague driver Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) almost to the head of the pack in every race. But when the black guy doesn’t listen to the white guy, the consequences are disastrous.
Surely that gratifies Carrick. And though it doesn’t happen immediately, the black guy acknowledges the white guy was completely right. Spoiler warning: I’m being quite literal with the word “disastrous.”
How did Joshua come to be a driver in a Formula One team in the first place? What sorts of obstacles, legitimate and arbitrary, did he have to overcome to become one of only two black drivers in British motor sports? The other black driver, by the way, is Lewis Hamilton (as himself), who in real life is the only one. But don’t tell Carrick that.
Lewis Hamilton founded the Hamilton Commission to look into this inexcusable lack of black representation in British motor sports.
As the first Black driver in Formula 1, Sir Lewis Hamilton was always aware of the lack of diversity across the motorsport industry. But this underrepresentation is not just limited to the driver pool, and also includes those who work in the garage and the engineers in the factories too. After reviewing the lack of diversity within the end of season photo in 2019, Lewis was spurred to take action and set out to understand the specific barriers to the recruitment and progression of Black people within UK motorsport. Lewis has always been vocal about the need for real industry wide change, but in order to make this change happen himself, he needed to know the facts. As a result, Lewis formed The Hamilton Commission, alongside The Royal Academy of Engineering, which presented an opportunity to simultaneously address the underrepresentation of Black people in UK motorsport, as well as the STEM sector. Following a ten month research period, which included initial data analysis, stakeholder mapping, a literature review in sport, education and employment, as well as primary quantitative and qualitative research with young people and in depth interviews with key stakeholders, The Hamilton Commission has published its report, Accelerating Change: Improving Representation of Black People in UK Motorsport.
None of that made it in the movie. Lewis Hamilton is just a name drop and a celebrity cameo. But the important thing is that it saved the movie from disapprobation for being the slightest bit woke.
F1: The Movie is rated PG-13 “for strong language, and action.” The sex scene is as short as it is predictable. The violence in this movie really is what parents should talk to their children about, how Sonny and Joshua in this movie set a bad example for how coworkers should relate to one another.
Roger Ebert used to say something to effect of that good movies are too short and bad movies are too long. With a running time of more than two and a half hours, F1 is definitely one of the latter. If you absolutely have no interest in F1 or in any kinds of sports, there’s probably nothing in F1 to hold your interest.
Hans Zimmer’s mostly forgettable score tries to add some nuance and depth to the predictable triumph at the end, but instead sounds like music that would have made more sense at the beginning. I give this movie ★★☆☆☆.
A drinking game if you watch this movie on home video that you can pause: any time a question is asked, pause and predict the answer. Take a swig if your prediction is correct. You’ll be very drunk by the end credits.
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