Big Car Go Vroom Vroom

I am not a car guy. Honestly, I’m not a sports guy in general, with only a few of the weird ones even managing to catch a passing interest. Brad Pitt in a movie about cars going really fast isn’t going to hook me. Hell, it took a few tries for me to get into a series about Vin Diesel and cars (Fast and Furious, as if you didn’t know), and that one isn’t really about sports. You’d have to do something really weird, like a movie about Dodgeball, or a movie about Curling or something… Actually, I watched one of those, too. Men with Brooms. It was pretty funny.

Regardless, I am not the target audience for a movie about cars. I didn’t care all that much about Ford vs. Ferrari. I didn’t even bother watching Ferrari. And I struggled to give two shits about F1: The Movie when it came out in theaters. I skipped it then and I was going to skip it on home video, too, except the Blu-Ray was on sale and everyone had said that, if nothing else, the pretty cars going vroom vroom were fun to watch. I’m not middle aged enough to care about old men driving cars but I am lizard brained enough to like pretty cars going vroom vroom.

Thus, I recently popped in F1: The Movie solely for the sake of watching those pretty cars do pretty things. And yeah, let’s be clear, this is a pretty movie. Warner Bros. and Apple spent upwards of $300 Mil on this big budget spectacular about very fast cars, and it’s hard to argue that it was anything other than money well spent. This is one of the prettiest movies I’ve seen in quite some time. It’s bright, it’s shiny, and the cars look real nice as they speed around the tracks. This is the kind of film you need to see on IMAX or, at the very least, on a massive home theater screen. It looks that great. It’s just a pity that the plotline is about as generic as it gets.

Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a former F1 driver who, years before, got into a massive accident right when he was on the precipice of true greatness. Since then he’s spent his many long years going from race event to race event, looking for the next big thrill he can find. We catch up with him at the start of the film running the 24 Hours of Daytona, an event he and his team end up winning. Having tackled that, he packs up his van and hits the road, intending to go down to Baja for an offroad race he’s had his eyes on.

His plans, though, are interrupted by his old friend, teammate, and rival, Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), because Rubén needs his help. Rubén recently bought the APXGP team and needs them to be a winner. At all. Like just even once. The team has done so poorly this year that they haven’t even scored a single point despite having a pretty solid driver, the young upstart Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), on the team. If they don’t score some serious points, or even get one first place finish, Rubén’s board will force him out and sell the team. This is Sonny’s one last shot at F1 greatness, that is if he can get out of his own head and turn this failing team around.

There is no denying that Apple and WB spent a lot of money to make a very pretty film, and I want to emphasize that again. But, deep down, what they’ve actually made is the prettiest piece of Dad Rock I think I’ve ever seen. This is a very simple, very basic film that never challenges its audience or makes them think at all. An old driver comes back for one last shot of glory all while showing the young hotshot how it’s done. It’s effectively the race driving answer to Top Gun: Maverick. Hell, you could basically call it Days of Thunder: Maverick, and if they’d cast Tom Cruise instead of Brad Pitt in the role it would functionally work as that legacy sequel.

That’s not to say the film is bad if that’s what you’re looking for. Part of the reason why I turned my nose up at the film when it was first announced was because I could predict the plot the second I saw the trailers and I knew it wasn’t really the kind of story I was looking for. It is incredibly basic. Will the older driver find the glory he was seeking? Of course he will. Will he teach the young upstart a thing or two about the sport? Absolutely. Will his gruff, rule-bending ways of doing things prove to be the right way despite what everyone else on the team says? As if you should have any doubt. This is a paint by numbers script that never once paints outside the lines, and in that regard I really struggled to care about what was going on.

Luckily for the film it has a lot you can like outside of its basic, bare-bones story. For starters, again, this film is really fucking pretty. Like it’s shocking how good it looks. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda, backed by the full production staff, and $300 Mil from the studios, made one of the most incredible looking films of 2025. It’s bright, it’s shiny, it dazzles in the clubs the characters visit and on the race tracks as the cars zip on past. This film is a feast for the eyes and that helps to keep you engaged in the F1 action even as much of the racing is done in montages and quick, specific scenes. This isn’t a movie that gets really deep into the sport of F1, but it certainly does make it look really good.

Backing that up, too, is the cast. Here is where I have to mention the other caveat I had when seeing this film: I don’t much like Brad Pitt as a person. In recent years there’s been a deluge of information about how he was a shitty, abusive husband and father. The stories that Angelina Jolie and her children have told about him color every performance of his I see now and I can’t help but think of that version of Brad Pitt when I watch a movie. I don’t like the guy… and I also have to acknowledge that Sonny Hayes is the kind of character he was born to play. All of that baggage actually adds to his character (bad as that sounds to say) and while I never really liked him here I grudgingly have to admit he’s good in the role.

I think the other actors do pretty well in what is, effectively, the Brad Pitt show. I liked Damson Idris as the hotshot young driver. He could have played his role as cockiness and swagger, not unlike a Tom Cruise character, but he manages to find some soulfulness, some inner fear, that shows you what is motivating his character, making him far more nuanced. Kerry Condon is also solid as Kate McKenna, the car’s engineer and Sonny’s love interest. She feels like a proper, fiery equal to Sonny, battling against him even as the film makes it obvious they’ll fall into bed together. Her plotline is basic but Condon does good work with her underwritten character.

But that does get me back to my main point: F1: The Movie is a very pretty but very flawed piece of cinema. As a bit of movie spectacle it does work. It’s gorgeous, and those cars really do look shiny as they go vroom vroom around the track. But it has no depth to it, no substance. This is as rote and formulaic as a film can get and the movie never tries to do otherwise. I compare it to Days of Thunder because that 1990 car driving flick was one of a dozen paint-by-numbers Tom Cruise flicks that all functioned the same. Cocky guy does cocky things in some new realm, whether it’s pool halls, fighter jets, bartending, or racing. It was a formula, and F1: The Movie is that same formula all over again. And if that’s what you want in a film you could do much worse. This is one of the prettiest versions of that formula I think I’ve ever seen.

But is it good? Only if you want the cinematic equivalent of Dad Rock. It’s loud, it’s crunchy, but it’ll never challenge you once. It does what it comes out to do then goes out in its own manufactured blaze of glory. That might be enough for some, but it’s not a film that I think I’m going to care about once the memories of its shiny cars fade. F1: The Movie is pretty but empty, all flash and sizzle but no substance, and it won’t stick in my brain long enough for me to ever go, “hey, you know what I want to watch? Uh… that movie with an old Brad Pitt… and cars… and… oh, forget it.”