All too often are the conventions of a sports drama centred on a fictional legend contrived. That is not a fault of the genre, but audience. We have come to expect the rise and success of unlikely champions. Rocky at least had some reality embedded in its nuanced, and more than likely accurate, view of its hero. They can fail and still find success. It is the mantra of Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), the washed-up veteran with one more race to prove himself in F1. Sporting, be it scrappy football or fiction-blurring wrestling, always has room for an underdog story. Just look at how well Vince Vaughn fared in an adaptation of late-night dodgeball tournaments. The glitz and glam of this Joseph Kosinski-directed F1 adaptation are not enough to overhaul the rigid, by-the-books storytelling. Not the underdog story, that much was an inevitability, but all the loose ends around it, copied and pasted from other, like-minded films.
A romance angle with Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), which heads nowhere, an old friend in Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), where the sole emotional overlap is knowing what a car is, and a bit of business espionage to keep people awake through this slog of a film. Length is no problem, and two-and-a-half hours being the norm is just fine if a film knows how to use this time. But idle chat around poker tables and a coming-of-age story, which every film fan will know and loathe, is featured here. Not convincingly, either. That is the problem. It’s how you use these inevitable parts to form the vehicle an audience takes a ride in, not the parts themselves. Any sports drama attempting to pull at the heartstrings of its audience is going to sentimentalise the fundamentals of the pastime, be it participation or viewing. F1 goes beyond that. It tries to, anyway. F1 flows well enough, if inevitably towards a vaguely satisfying ending where everything is accomplished but little is resolved.
Part of F1 relies not on your love for the sport (those who enjoy watching paint dry or counting how many times the minute hand of a clock goes by in a day will delight in watching F1) but your interest in Pitt’s continued Apple TV+ acting. Between this and Wolfs, it’s not looking all that promising. F1 has no problem bringing together a large cast, but it’s disappointment after disappointment. Nothing comes of the team spirit, the interplay between Condon, Damson Idris, and Pitt, lost entirely. They are one-note because to serve another part of the plot makes these characters connected in deeper ways, something Kosinski and his team behind the camera are hellbent on avoiding. There’s a nice balance which soon turns trivial in seeing disaster, race, disaster. F1 even manages to repeat itself, with both leads having brushes with their mortality, as is inevitable for a film about driving at unruly speeds.
Where the pacing of F1 reflects the sport itself, viewers get nowhere, and fast. There is an argument to be made for the ongoing problems and subplots of F1 being open-ended and unresolved in a c’est la vie type of charm. But it doesn’t have that. What it has are lines of cliché dialogue piled on top of one another as they try and find a way through this poor Pitt-led drama. Any inevitability a viewer can think of is no doubt around the corner. Once you have driven a track this many times, those predictabilities are taken for granted. We get comfortable with plots and tone because we wish to pick up on the nuances of the director, the peculiarities a cast as big as this can so often bring to the big screen. F1 is squeaky clean and, despite all the carnage, crashes, and crises brought to the screen, the unconvincing performances undermine those reflections on morality and passion almost immediately. Even its few sleights of hand are thrown out for the sake of safety, ironic given how often F1 wishes to show just how dangerous driving can be.
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