What I know about Formula One racing I can fit into one small paragraph. Pit stops are very swift. Motorsport billionaire Bernie Ecclestone is not a tall man but seems to be attracted to very tall women. The cars' designs are monstrously complex having to take in so many factors to produce a vehicle as aerodynamic as a bullet. The advertising on the cars and the clothing goes over the top and back again. Winners' ceremonies are a ludicrous waste of top tier champagne. Short enough? Too short?

What is the attraction for the armchair fan and stadium spectator? Does the sport's allure have its roots in half-expecting to witness someone dying? Is it the same way that we have been conditioned to see the natural world through the distorted edit of wildlife films in terms of one predation after another when actually it's mostly very peaceful on the Serengeti? Is it the speed people find thrilling? Is it the competition, dirty tricks and loopholes that allow all sorts of strategies frowned upon but are in themselves not illegal? It's these that allow our hero an edge and an edge is often all that's needed. F1 professionals do not equate success with the number of seconds a car can make up in a lap. At the highest level, it's down to the microsecond.

The achingly predictable plot is as follows. Sonny Hayes, ex-F1 driver having retired after a bad accident in his 30s, is now a nomadic racing driver for hire. Any race. F1 Team owner Ruben Cervantes catches up with Sonny, a good friend from their motor racing heydays. Ruben's F1 team is in trouble and he needs his buddy to be a mentor to their young hotshot driver. Sonny dismisses the offer but is tempted by a first class ticket to London for the next race. Do you really need any more than that? There are races, lots of races, the hotshot is predictably cocky and ageist, Sonny is predictably cool and eventually after many set-backs, and a swiftly developed love interest, (an interesting character vital to the car's performance), the team knits together and well, you know the rest. But so do the filmmakers. Kosinski and co. are all too aware of the three act structure and why it has worked for a century or more. As I've said many times (apologies for the repetition), the entertainment is in the manner of the telling of the predictable story, how we get to where we know we are going to be. That said, F1 is a Jerry Bruckheimer production so an 80s feel is almost a signature, a certificate of authenticity, de rigueur for the action blockbuster. I am going nowhere near the "We did it for real," back and forth as a marketing tool. As the best YouTube series on VFX says in the title, "No CGI is Really Just Invisible CGI***, a series well worth anyone's time. This is a movie that dares (in 2025) to celebrate the abilities of heroic men (remember them?) and like Kosinski's Top Gun sequel, it too has started well at the box office. It seems that there is an audience out there hungry for films not particularly bothered about adhering to the surging currents of cultural upheaval.

As expected, the film looks glorious courtesy of cinematographer Claudio Miranda and for a film with a significant number of races, each one another stepping stone in the development of the team leading to you know what, the filmmakers do keep your interest from chequered flagging. Whoever invented the hi-speed drone shot flying over cars racing in the opposite direction to give the erroneous impression that the cars are going twice as fast should have patented the technique. But then there are only a finite number of ways you can shoot fast cars and Kosinski has exhausted the lot. Extremely well edited by seasoned film editor Stephen Mirrione, the long running time is not as much as an issue as that submarine scene in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning but Act 2 might have been slimmed down a little. Again, to stress, these are directorial decisions not editorial. The editor is there to serve the director's vision and not their own opinions. In all departments, this film is a class act and objectively, even if you dislike the film's subject, you have to concede that F1 is made with great skill and a lot of heart. And where is most of that heart?

Brad Pitt, now in his 60s, still looks frustratingly like a young bona fide movie star. I felt sorry for the hotshot driver who was never going to dislodge Pitt from the audience's rapt attention and point of view. He plays Sonny as partially broken, once physically broken but he has an ambition; to reach that state of nirvana he'd experienced only once before in a racing car. The small irony of being so driven is that he's never driven. He's always in the driving seat whether it's F1, Daytona or the dunes based Baja 100. Pitt is never dull on screen and his character's laid back nature is tested a few times in the film but his inner Buddha is never out of the frame for long. Hotshot driver Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris, is of course initially unsympathetic, has a very pronounced, positive relationship with his mother (played by Ted Lasso alumnus, Sarah Niles) and due to charisma and good writing, he doesn't stay unsympathetic for too long. The film is essentially there to decrease the psychological distance between the older and young drivers, to make them act as a team. But the real surprise for me was seeing Javier Bardem (playing Sonny's friend Ruben) having so much fun. When your breakout role is that of a dubiously quaffed assassin in No Country for Old Menand then subsequent roles get darker and darker, it's such a joy to see and hear the man with real delight in his soul. The only prominent female character in the cast, Kerry Condon as Kate McKenna, the F1 team's technical director, has a not so secret weapon in her own genetic arsenal. Attractive and just as driven as Pitt's Sonny, she has the goal to design the very best racing car. She is also Irish and that Tipperary accent, personally speaking, would have had me at 'Hullo'. You can imagine how much joy the TV series Bad Sisters gave me even though she wasn't in it but perhaps should have been. Her technical smarts are all in place and the film often indulges her character allowing her a sprinkling of F1 jargon leaving us non-petrolheads going "Uh?" but that's all in the name of verisimilitude. Her instigation of a poker game is a highlight of the film and for a movie about racing cars, that came as quite the surprise. Not relying on all the competitors in the races as de facto antagonists, F1 has an eminently hissable villain in the shape of board member Peter Banning played with oily ambition by Tobias Menzies. In the real world, he wisely bets on the underdog to lose. Poor old Menzies doesn't twig that he's in a Hollywood movie and that underdogs usually come out on top. His status as this movie's villain is assured.

The film is littered with F1 star cameos (my thanks to Wikipedia), not that I would notice, though the name Lewis Hamilton is at least familiar to me. He's listed as a producer. Perhaps he really did diligently perform the same duties as Jerry Bruckheimer but I suspect his name greased the wheels of the Hollywood charm offensive to secure F1's cooperation. That's more than enough to garner a producer's credit in these circumstances. Being a Bruckheimer production, there's no end of high voltage standalone songs. Pitt's arrival at the first race of the movie is liberally accompanied by a song, a cover of which is so familiar to anyone growing up in the UK in the 70s watching Top of the Pops. The opening riff to Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin is as iconic as any in its genre. It gets F1 one off to a flying start. The songs are interspersed with a hardly noticeable score by Hans Zimmer. I never thought I'd ever be writing those words. I suspect there was too much sound to compete with to get any music to cut through the engine roars. Yes, there are crashes and edge of the seat driving manoeuvres all covered with a phalanx of cameras giving the editor option paralysis but rooted in the driver's seat is Brad Pitt whose eyes do all the talking. There are hundreds of shots of just Pitt's eyes peeking through the fire retardant balaclava and crash helmet but it's a credit to the film that these shots never feel repetitive especially because they are necessary for us to actually care what happens even if we know what's going to happen two and a half hours before it does.

* Departed, 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight

** https://theplaylist.net/joseph-kosinski-talks-f1-fearless-authenticity-the-differences-between-brad-pitt-tom-cruise-more-20250628/