‘F1′ review: Brad Pitt is the engine behind a loud and silly racing movie

The pleasures of “F1” are engineered to bypass the brain. It’s muscular and thrilling and zippy, even though at over two-and-a-half hours long, it has a toy dump truck’s worth of plot. Sonny (Brad Pitt), a 50-something driver who spun out in the ’90s, agrees to compete in the globe’s most prestigious racing event to salvage his reputation and APX, the failing team of his buddy Ruben (Javier Bardem). What he’s really chasing is a sense of fulfillment he can’t, and won’t, catch. It eludes him like a mechanical rabbit on a track.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski from a script by Ehren Kruger, “F1” has an amiable romance with a likable automotive engineer, Kate (Kerry Condon), and a bit of cautionary flag-waving about the financial shenanigans taking place off the track. But really, it’s built from the same chassis as Kosinki’s last movie, “Top Gun: Maverick.” There’s the A-list reckless elder, his upstart protegee (Damson Idris) and a high-octane mission that’s damn near impossible, with lots of speedy action intercut with scenes of its alpha male movie star out of his helmet and grinning for fans.

The film opens with a kinetic montage of Sonny’s dreams. With a meditation tape on and old nightmares in his head, the images flicker between ocean waves and nerve-racking curves, from zen calm to zen focus. Sonny wakes up, blasts some Led Zeppelin and grabs the wheel at the Daytona Speedway where fireworks explode so close to his dashboard that Florida appears to be under attack. Editor Stephen Mirrione cheekily layers Robert Plant’s ecstatic moans over a shot of a pit crew’s air gun having its way with a set of lug nuts.

Straightaway, the energy is so macho that it’s almost corny. Embrace the tone while allowing the occasional eye roll at Brad Pitt’s near-mythic modern-day Steve McQueen. Laconic, cocky, stubborn and unapologetic, he’s a loner in a sport that requires teamwork. Drivers can’t get anywhere without people eager to change all four of their tires in 2.9 seconds.

Sonny must help APX place in the top 10 before investors like Banning (a disarmingly twinkly Tobias Menzies) fire the entire staff. His much younger teammate, Josh (Idris), is also on the chopping block but scoffs at Sonny as though he’s Methuselah pushing the first stone wheel. “He’s old — like really old, like 80,” Josh grumbles to his mother, a scene-stealing Sarah Niles, who visibly disagrees: She looks at Sonny like a Popsicle on a hot day. Nevertheless, the squad needs to shift strategies and Sonny is here to take them from pathetic to aggressive. He gets a room of technicians to chant, “Combat! Combat!”

But the cars aren’t great. When a Ferrari representative is asked what he thinks of APX, he replies, “We don’t.” In turn, the script barely thinks of Ferrari either, which feels especially brazen as the film was shot on location at nine Formula One Grand Prix events during the 2023 season, from Japan to Mexico to Abu Dhabi. There’s priceless production value in watching Pitt do laps on the real tracks surrounded by real chaos, real drivers and real fans doing the wave. Still, it’s a bit surreal to hear the announcers obsess over Sonny’s high jinks in the back of the pack while ignoring the winners.

The counterargument is that you can’t make a villain out of that year’s actual champion, Max Verstappen, when Sonny drives a lot like him. Both drivers share a nail-gnawing approach to safety that can feel dangerously close to a demolition derby. (Last year, F1 tweaked a rule so that one of his tactics here now results in a disqualification.)

The film itself pulls a couple illegal moves, most gratingly when it orders us to care about Sonny’s past spinal injury, only to pivot away from that plot point and show him hurtling over sand dunes. His one big monologue about what racing means to him doesn’t land with any impact.

But “F1” is on firm ground watching Sonny shake up a sport that’s become the world’s most expensive game of chase. Technology has taken over with simulators and treadmills and sensors hunting for spare fractions of a second to eliminate. The film doesn’t insult our intelligence by pretending all of these innovations are nonsense — they matter just as much as Sonny’s mystical connection to the road. For balance, however, he and his love interest, Kate, bond over their old-school hobbies: He jogs, she bikes.

Idris makes his rookie character bristly yet endearing, with the thin-skinned transparency of a generation raised to measure its worth in likes. Josh’s aptly named manager, Cashman (Samson Kayo), pressures him to spend more time on social media, arguing that in today’s plugged-in modern circuit, fame is as good of a career path as getting across the finish line first.

I saw “F1” in a screening that was predominantly influencers who didn’t seem offended by the movie’s disdain for vapid self-promotion. Sonny sneers every time he catches Josh doing a phony smile, even when the kid is simply posing for the advertisements they’re both supposedly contracted to do. Instead, we were all swept up by the races themselves, which are honest-to-Goodyear fantastic.

The cinematographer Claudio Miranda keeps the camera fast and low. Sometimes he fills the screen with road, other times he places the lens between the windshield and the wheel so all we can see is Pitt’s gloved fist jerking around turns. The noises are energizing: tire squeals, engine rumbles and a hip soundtrack once it gets past the classic rock standards. To keep pace, Hans Zimmer has concocted a visceral new growl that rattles our seats.

Race cars and blockbuster movies have a core thing in common: They’re expensive contraptions made by teams who are painfully aware that they can fine-tune everything and still crash. The average Formula One car costs $20 million. Pitt’s “F1” salary was one-and-a-half times that (and the film’s overall budget has been estimated between $200 and $300 million). As mechanized as a race — or a movie — can feel, success or failure hinge on the human element, the hero battling the gremlins in the machine.

Unlike in his earlier “Troy” years, Pitt is confident having a movie this massive built around him. Sonny is the closest he’s come to circling back around to his breakout role in “Thelma & Louise” as a charismatic cowboy scamp. For decades, he tried to wriggle out of that typecasting to play kooks and himbos. Every time he was advised to play the romantic hero, those roles seemed to pinch him around the collar. But Pitt’s 2019 Oscar win as the stuntman Clint Booth in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” seems to have finally made him comfortable in the skin of a red-blooded sex symbol. At 61, he seems to have sprouted a new rung of abs.

Yet, Pitt can’t resist quirking up the character in ways that don’t totally congeal. One scene, he’s acting like the Marlboro Man; in another, he reveals a torso littered with doodly Gen-Z tattoos, including a cartoon hot dog shooting finger guns. If that’s Sonny’s sense of humor, there’s no other evidence of it. I adored the costume designer Julian Day’s avant-garde takes on a plain white shirt — fancy textures, loose Tyler Durden-esque cuffs — but couldn’t imagine Sonny packing any of it in the worn duffel bag on his shoulder. Who cares? We’re just here to watch Pitt go.