Fast cars, flat drama: F1’s sanitised comeback narrative
F1 is a comeback story that skips the grit—no risks, no wreckage, just shiny cars and algorithm-approved emotional beats.
He could’ve been a contender, could’ve been a champion—but now he’s long in the tooth, past his prime, washed up, over the hill. Except…maybe….there’s just enough juice left in the tank to have another crack. F1 is the latest example of the evergreen comeback narrative—a new one sure to arrive next month, or next week, or maybe tomorrow, delivering another second chance story involving redemption and renewal.
Brad Pitt plays Formula 1 driver Sonny Hayes, who tells the man luring him out of retirement—former colleague-cum-racing team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem)—that “I’m not coming back.” We know exactly where this scene is placed on the monomyth trajectory—the bit near the start of the hero’s journey, marked “refusal of the call.” Sonny will rise to the challenge and join the fictitious APXGP racing team, butting heads with a much younger teammate—Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris)—and delivering string section-accompanied lines such as “I was gonna be world champion. Best that ever was.”
We know he’s the underdog we’re supposed to root for, but Ehren Kruger’s script doesn’t do the hard, dirty work, pushing the protagonist into the gutter, giving him nothing left to lose. Everything’s an upwards curve. We learn via dialogue that Sonny became a gambling addict and racing driver, but director Joseph Kosinski can’t bear to dirty his very shiny film by showing us that. It’s so clean it feels like it’s hiding something—like a teenage boy who keeps his room spotless. I wanted that moment with Sonny in the gutter, near-empty whiskey bottle in hand, kicked out of the casino, having spent all his dough on poker and blow.
But this is, after all, a chunky feature-length advertisement for the sport itself, with many of the major players—Ferrari etcetera—represented. Pitt’s performance, in fact his very casting, doesn’t help. The man’s a fine actor but he struggles to play a banged-up, pathos-dripping never-made-it. Mickey Rourke or Michael Madsen, they could’ve given the role real poignancy, their leathery faces and trampled on visages implying, before they even open their mouths, a constellation of bad decisions, broken promises and big missteps.
But F1 is not The Wrestler. By god, it is not The Wrestler. Everything needs to look hunky-dory and it all had to make sense on paper. The producer is Jerry Bruckheimer; the composer is Hans Zimmer; the star is Brad Pitt; the director is the gun who helmed Top Gun: Maverick. There’s an irritating paradox at the film’s core: everything is played safe, but it’s about a guy who takes big risks. Sonny is an agent of change, upsetting the status quo with his bolshy racing style, reiterated through lines like “who said anything about ‘safe’”?. But the film has none of his cavalier spirit.
At one point, deep a race deep into the experience, Kosinski deploys a split screen, one half of the frame dedicated to Sonny and the other to Joshua. I felt a pang of excitement: this could be an interesting way to stage the scene. But the split-screen was over so quickly I wondered why the director bothered to include it in the first place. There’s also a potentially romantic element between Sonny and APXGP’s technical director, Kate McKenn (Kerry Condon), but their sexual chemistry is so muted it feels almost non-existent, as if real carnal energy would be against the spirit of things. We know that if their (barely apparent) desires are consummated, it’s because the algorithm says “yes.”
The whole thing, dare I say it, is very middle of the road, calibrated to appeal to the widest possible audience. Some of the racing scenes eventually engaged me but the everything is annoyingly competent. I found myself wanting Kosinski to throw some gunk on the lens, bend the frame, insert an unexpected cut, something to mess up the neat order of things. Not to mention the need for speed, because F1 stiflingly long to boot; you really feel that hefty 156 minute runtime. Sonny likes to floor it; the film stays on cruise control.
