Brad Pitt goes full movie star in skilfully made but monotonous motor-racing drama
F1
★★★
(M), 155 minutes
'Thrilling' and 'lulling' can be oddly close together, and that's how it feels watching the cars speed round and round the track in the skilfully made if somewhat monotonous F1, which is the victory lap for its director Joseph Kosinski following his box-office triumph with Top Gun: Maverick three years ago.
Both films involve a seated hero moving at high speed in a confined space, although where Top Gun: Maverick verged on being a war movie, F1 is strictly a sports movie, which lowers the stakes even if Formula One driving is riskier than, say, tennis.
Tom Cruise, the star of Top Gun, has also been swapped out for Brad Pitt, which probably makes just as much difference. Both are movie stars in the full sense, unabashedly there to be looked at, and both have retained a boyish mystique into late middle age.
But Cruise has never once in his whole career played a character who could be called relaxed, whereas cultivated laziness is what Pitt is all about. As Sonny Hayes, the hero of F1, he does a lot of sleepy-eyed smirking, though we're meant to understand that his mind is going a mile a minute under the surface.
Sonny is the Rip Van Winkle of the Formula One world, induced to make a comeback as a driver long after his promising career was cut short, as if he'd just woken up from a 30-year nap.
In fact, he's been up to a range of things in the meantime, including supporting himself as a New York cab driver and as a professional gambler, besides having several failed marriages under his belt.
A gambler is what he remains, the kind who's studied the odds and believes he knows how to beat the house. On the track, he has a range of tricky strategies that test the limits of the rules, which the commentators outline for us in voiceover. These typically involve starting from behind and using this to his advantage, roughly his approach to life in general.
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