‘F1’ movie review: Brad Pitt’s vapid vroom with a view-OxBig News Network

I’ve sat through enough summer movies to know when one’s trying to show off, and F1 doesn’t even pretend to play it cool. It kicks things off with a package full of revving engines, shiny chrome, and the promise of a big, sweaty comeback, before you’ve even had a crack at your popcorn. It’s got Brad Pitt behind the wheel, doing his best weathered rebel thing as a former racing star who’s spent the last few decades drifting between racetracks and poor life choices, and honestly seems kind of into it.

The movie kicks off with Pitt suiting up and sliding into a race car like he’s done it every morning since birth, the camera swooping around him like a music video. The tires scream, Led Zeppelin blares, and for a brief, glorious moment, you’ll probably believe, cinema is so back.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski — who, fresh off Top Gun: Maverick, clearly still has a thing for fast-moving vehicles and beautiful, semi-naked men — F1 is slick, thundering, and brings the same sensory maximalism to the tarmac from the 2022 summer sensation. The realism is intoxicating, almost suffocating. You can smell the burning rubber and hear the hiss of tire changes, but what you rarely catch is narrative traction. It wants you to feel things, like awe and nostalgia and some kind of rugged manly yearning about glory days and second chances. But it’s mostly just a very expensive-looking way to watch cars go really, really fast.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in a still from ‘F1’
| Photo Credit:
Apple Original Films

Pitt’s laconic ex-champ Sonny Hayes gets lured out of semi-retirement to mentor cocky hotshot Joshua Pearce (played by a swaggering Damson Idris) and help rescue a floundering team from complete irrelevance. There’s flirtations with a token love interest (Kerry Condon’s underwritten but gamely played engineer), a gruff team owner (Javier Bardem, doing Bardem things), and a handful of pit crew just vague enough to keep from getting in the way. You’ve seen this story before — in Ford v Ferrari, Rush, Days of Thunder, Speed Racer, and about a dozen sports movies that swear they’re about more than just the game — just never on IMAX with Dolby Atmos.

Sure, the racing sequences look fantastic. Kosinski films them with a loving intensity that makes you feel like you’re right there in the cockpit, especially during those rare moments when the film stops cutting every half-second and lets you take in the speed. You feel immersed in the tension, the danger, the beauty of threading a car at 250 miles an hour, and all this footage is certainly impressive in its ostentation; but the technical brilliance of these sequences soon start to blur together. Ironically, despite filming at actual Grand Prix’s and embedding its actors deep in the F1 world, Kosinski’s film ends up feeling curiously distant.

After a while, it’s hard to tell one track from the next, or why this lap matters more than the last. The races don’t build on anything of value so much as repeat the formula with expository commentary layered on thick. Every race is narrated like a highlight reel for the F1 noobs, flattening the tension with intrusive play-by-play (“Sonny’s in last place! That’s not great for APXGP!”— thanks, disembodied voice of the obvious, I have eyes.)

Ehren Kruger’s script feels pressure-tested in a wind tunnel until any semblance of nuance blew clean off. Everyone talks like they’re in a Nike ad. At one point, someone actually says, “Sometimes when you lose, you win,” which, spoiler: means absolutely nothing.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in a still from ‘F1’
| Photo Credit:
Apple Original Films

The thing is that F1 is never actually boring. It’s loud and fun, in that ‘I-can’t-hear-my-own-thoughts’ kind of way. It’s glossy and confident and clearly built by people who know how to put on a show. If you just want to watch gorgeous cars go fast while Brad Pitt smolders under a racing helmet, you’ll get exactly that. The IMAX sound design practically does CPR on your ribcage, Hans Zimmer’s synthy Challengers-like basslines kick like caffeine, and you’ll get swept up in the immersion, even if your brain checks out. 

What’s frustrating is that it could’ve been so much more. This thing had everything — access to real F1 races, cameos from actual drivers, a budget big enough to pave a second Monaco — and somehow, it still feels like it’s running on fumes.

Still, for all the wheelspin, F1 isn’t a total crash. It just really wants to dazzle and deliver on the summer blockbuster promise like Maverick, and for a while, that ambition is fun to watch. You catch flashes of something richer in Pitt’s easy gravitas, Idris’s charisma, and Condon’s dry wit. There’s even the outline of a soulful story in Hayes’s arc, as a washout chasing one last lap just to feel like himself again. But these are sketches, not portraits, brushed aside whenever another pair of AirPods Max or sponsor decal demands screen time.

F1 is a different beast of a racing film. It wants to burn some rubber and look good doing it, but once the dust settles and Zimmer stops rattling your spine, it’s just a turbocharged two-and-a-half hour victory lap to nowhere.

F1 is currently running in theatres

Published – June 27, 2025 04:24 pm IST