Most movies have one line of dialogue that sums up the whole message. “There’s no place like home,” for example, or “Life is like a box of chocolates.” It’s everything you need to know about the film distilled into one handy-dandy quote you can take home with you, which will always remind you of “The Wizard of Oz” or “Forrest Gump.”
I suspect filmmaker Joseph Kosinski wants audiences to take some deep, penetrating message away from his racing drama “F1 The Movie” (not to be confused with “F1 The Topiary Garden” or “F1 The Papier-mâché”). His film has lots of serious lines about the masculine ego, the competitive mindset and the value of patience. But I’m pretty sure the six words that sum up “F1 The Movie” best come at the start of Brad Pitt’s third-act monologue, where he finally reveals something about his character after approximately two hours: “It’s not much of a story.”
Boy, ain’t that the truth.
“F1” stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a race car driver who isn’t down on his luck — he literally just won 24 Hours of Daytona — but gets treated like an underdog anyway. His old racing buddy Ruben (Javier Bardem) has a Formula One team that stinks out loud. It’s been 2 1/2 years and they haven’t even placed in one race. Ruben is going to lose his team if they don’t come in first at least one time this season and, frankly, he probably should lose his team. Three years and still nothing? Damn, they suck.
So Ruben offers Sonny a chance to join their team and teach their hotshot rookie Joshua “Noah” Pearce (Damson Idris, “Snowfall”) a thing or two. Pearce is too cool for Sonny’s valuable lessons, mostly because Sonny imparts them like a cocky a-hole, so these two buttheads immediately butt heads. Sonny also falls for Kate (Kerry Condon), the team’s technical director, presumably to pad the film since wow, does that relationship make no impact whatsoever.
“F1” would play like a “Top Gun: Maverick” ripoff even if Joseph Kosinski, who also directed “Top Gun: Maverick” (in case you forgot), was nowhere near this thing. It’s another slickly photographed, self-portentous parade of macho preening in which a rebellious veteran shows everyone else in the industry how to do their jobs, how to think and, in this case, how to wear their damn socks. Brad Pitt can do no wrong, even when he’s wrong. Thank God he’s here to make us all better people. That’s not annoying in the slightest. At least “Maverick” mixed it up a bit with some beach football and stole just enough from the Death Star battle in “Star Wars” to goose up the ending (all puns intended).
Kosinski shot “F1” with Imax in mind, and it shows. Every single shot is crisp and focused and framed for maximum oomph. The sound was designed to get cranked at maximum volume. Hans Zimmer’s score is custom-made to get you pumped, which is vitally important since the film runs out of gas so fast.
“F1” is over 2 1/2 hours long, which is pretty impressive for a film with about 90 minutes of material in it. It’s scene after scene of Sonny pulling weird racing tricks to give his awful team an advantage, followed by Sonny not quite coming to the finish line. Every race ends with some other team popping their corks and showering each other with manly fluids while Brad Pitt waits on the sidelines, still bottled up. This, combined with Kosinski’s antiseptic visual style and Ehren Kruger’s limp screenplay (with a co-story credit by Kosinski himself) make “F1 The Movie” an incredibly sterile film about virility. It’s so manly it can barely perform.
This may also explain why “F1” has so little interest in its few women characters, who exist to prop up their male co-stars and then get out of the way, lest they accidentally add some backstory or subplot and undermine this shallow guy’s night out. Pitt and Condon have a date in a bar that’s one of the most awkward getting-to-know-you scenes on record. Someday, colleges will offer courses on how not to write like “F1 The Movie.”
“F1” is slick enough to capture your attention for an hour and a half. Again, unfortunately, it’s 2 1/2 hours long. The repetitive story, stale characterizations, portentous self-celebration and oddly flaccid take on the masculine drive just keep puttering along, long after our interest has waned. It’s a classic car that looks brand new — but it hasn’t had a lube job in decades.
“F1” races into theaters on June 27.
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