Joseph Kosinski, who once made me believe a man could still fly a jet by feel, now wants me to believe a man can still drive a car by feel. I arrived to argue with him. I left having lost the argument, and enjoyed losing it.
By Ignatius Vale, Critic-in-Residence · Anno MMXXV · 6 minI do not care for sport. I care even less for sport dressed up as cinema, which is usually cinema that has given up. So I went to F1 the way I go to most things that promise speed and deliver noise — arms crossed, glove on, prepared to be unmoved by an engine note. Reader, the engine note moved me. I am as surprised as you are.
The premise, stripped of its varnish, is not new: a man who once had the gift, ruined by a crash and thirty wasted years, is dragged back to the one place that still recognises him. Sonny Hayes — a name that sounds like a diner, and is played by Brad Pitt like a man who has been driving away from something since 1993 — is talked back onto the grid by an old teammate, now the desperate owner of a team called APXGP that exists one bad weekend from extinction. You have seen this film's skeleton before, in a hundred sports pictures. What you have not seen is what Kosinski hangs on it.
Pitt, playing a career and not just a character
Pitt does not perform recklessness so much as fatigue with his own legend — a driver who was, by every account of the people around him, the best natural talent his generation produced, and who has spent three decades proving to himself that talent was never the point. He is vain in the ways a man that age is allowed to be vain, and honest about the rest. The film wisely does not ask him to apologise for either. Opposite him, Damson Idris plays the rookie half of the pairing with the right amount of resentment curdling into respect, and Kerry Condon, as the team's technical director, is the one adult in the paddock who treats the whole enterprise like an engineering problem rather than a redemption arc — which, not incidentally, is exactly what keeps the film from drowning in its own sentiment.
A camera that finally sits in the car
I am obliged, as ever, to be brief about the machinery, so: the racing was shot with cameras rigged directly to modified cars run at real circuits during actual Grand Prix weekends, with the sport's own drivers and teams lending their paddocks as backdrop — and the difference between that and a green-screen approximation is not subtle. There is a physical honesty to the blur at the edge of the frame, the way a helmet camera catches a corner arriving a half-second before the driver's hands do. It is the same instinct that made Top Gun: Maverick feel dangerous rather than merely loud, applied here to a sport that was already dangerous and merely needed someone to stop pretending otherwise.
The film does not ask you to forgive the cliché. It asks you to feel the corner arrive a half-second before you're ready for it — and then it does that for two hours straight.
Clichés, taken at full throttle
Let me not overpraise it. The plot machinery creaks exactly where you expect it to creak — the sponsor who must be won over, the rival who must be out-driven, the wound that must be reopened before it can close properly. Kosinski is not interested in surprising you with the story. He is interested in making the two-hundredth telling of it feel, for two hours, like the first. That is a narrower ambition than the one Nolan set himself with Homer, and I will not pretend otherwise. But within that narrower frame, executed at this level of craft and commitment, with two Formula 1 teams' worth of goodwill loaned to a Hollywood production and not squandered — it is very hard to leave the theatre unmoved, and I say that as a man whose entire professional posture is built on leaving theatres unmoved.
Formula, executed with real conviction.
I do not award numbers — a film is not a lap time, and I am not a stopwatch. What I press into a review is my name, like a seal into wax, and I do not spend it lightly. Take the crest above as my whole verdict; take this as the reason for it.
You did not ask me for a number. You asked what it was like. So: it is Kosinski cashing in the credibility Maverick earned him on the most familiar chassis in sport — the comeback picture — and refusing to let familiarity slow him down. It is, by wide and public critical account, one of the best-reviewed studio films of its summer, and the audience in my theatre applauded at the checkered flag, which I have not heard happen in some years. Go for the racing. Stay, against your better judgment, for Pitt.