F1

Brad Pitt is a maverick old racing driver who is recruited by a failng F1 team. He butts heads with his hot-shot young team mate.

I missed this at the cinema and that might have been a mistake, because this is a really flash and well rendered film that goes to great lengths to put you inside an F1 car. Unfortunetly it’s little more than that.

The dialogue is on auto-pilot, cheesy and hackneyed to the point of ridicule. One of the opening scenes is literally the Ocean’s Eleven style ‘Brad it’s good to see you, you son of a bitch’.

The level of access they have to the sport is excellent, which is to be expected for an offical F1 film. It’s risky setting something in the real world because the inaccuracies and implausible elements to the film stand out more, but it is quite novel having something being grounded in the actual sport Ted Lasso-style.

I like that they set the HQ at McLaren, and eveyone lives and works in middle-England. That’s the reality of F1, almost all the teams are based around there. You can tell someone cares about the sport too because we see one of the best representations of how steep the hill at Spa is I’ve ever seen.

What stinks however is the constant explanation and exposition, sometimes from the characters but mainly from the fake TV commentary. It’s so grating and doesn’t let up at all, they are still telling you stuff about the rules and tyres right in the very last key race. You have to wonder what the point is - non-fans won’t care and are along for the ride, and fans already know all this shit.

Kerry Condon is the love interest, who works card to rise above the dodgy material - she’s effectively been written in as ‘hot boffin that looks at a screen late at night’. We didn’t need a relationship there but Hollywood is always going to be Hollywood I guess.

A solid effort that works where it counts and otherwise plays it a bit too safe.