Alright I'm six for ten of the 2025 Best Picture nominees, so let's dive back into the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
Movie #6 is the Joseph Kosinski-helmed car racing action-drama F1, starring Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, and Kerry Condon. Pitt's character Sonny Hayes is an aging car racer who blew his big chance at superstardom thirty years ago in a fiery crash, and now bounces from circuit to circuit just to satisfy his love of driving, while living in a van (down by the river?). His old friend and teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem in a odd bit of wasted casting) shows up one day to recruit him for his F1 team - it's late in the season and they're doing so poorly Ruben is in danger of losing team ownership. The team's top driver is a cocky young fella named Joshua Pearce, who has talent but lacks the experience to exploit the rules of the track and eke out some wins. The cars designed by technical director Kate McKenna (Condon, in an overachieving performance) are also less than ideal and aren't getting the top speeds necessary to win. Sonny shakes things up and despite initially butting heads with the crew, earns their trust and builds a rapport with both Joshua and Kate, and the assignment provides him with one last shot at glory. Plus there's a whole lot of car racing.
F1 feels like a throwback to the comfortable blockbusters of the 80s and 90s, as did Kosinski's earlier film Top Gun: Maverick. Both films involve an aging leading man mentoring a younger generation, both films have extensive action sequences and stunts done with real vehicles being operated by real people, and both films have a very predictable story. Formula 1 is right. But unlike TG:M, the character and dialogue scenes didn't make me cringe. They're perhaps a bit wooden - Pitt's lines are sometimes delivered so robotically I wondered if he showed up to the ADR sessions begrudgingly - but he's so naturally charming and charismatic it's impossible not to like Sonny as a character. Picture Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's Cliff Booth, but as a racecar driver.
The racing scenes are of course the film's main hook, and as expected they're quite exhilarating. As someone who knows next to nothing about the rules of auto racing, I was still able to follow along thanks to the dialogue of the announcers explaining the various strategies being used. Like Pitt's character in Moneyball, Sonny is only concerned with getting results, even if his methods are unorthodox and often due only to technicalities. Case in point a race where Sonny intentionally damages his own car to force a safety car onto the track and slow the race down. As his car is being repaired Joshua meanwhile is able to gain one position. Sonny repeats this tactic multiple times until Joshua finishes in the top ten, a first for the team. Sequences like this are a lot of fun and by far the most interesting part of the movie.
Sadly the overall story is, as I implied earlier, popcorn fluff. There's the obligatory mentor vs. student tension, the romantic attraction between Sonny and Kate, the scheming board member trying to sabotage the team so he can buy it cheap, and even what seemed to be a concussion subplot that never paid off. Some tweaks to the story to move it in unexpected directions would've made this more than just a crowd-pleasing diversion. Ford v. Ferrari this is definitely not; I'm honestly kind of baffled this made the Best Picture field. I guess the Academy just really still appreciates any big-screen spectacle that can get people to buy movie tickets, and the Avatar series is wearing out its welcome.
At 155 minutes, F1 is probably 15-20 minutes longer than it needs to be, but it doesn't feel like a slog. Pitt is always fun to watch, the racing scenes are very engaging, and the formulaic parts of the story are an oddly refreshing throwback to a simpler, dumber time at the movies, without being groan-inducing like those of Top Gun: Maverick.
I'll give F1 a gentleman's *** out of ****.
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