'F1' is precisely the movie it needed to be

If you've seen even one trailer for the new Brad Pitt movie F1 over the past, like, ten months that its trailers have been playing, you probably understand exactly what the movie is, probably beat for beat. And you're right. You're absolutely right. But in the case of F1, as is the case of nearly every well-made sports movie, that isn't a bug; it's a feature.

(By the way, speaking of trailers, if you own an iPhone and you haven't already done so, please check out the extremely dope iPhone-exclusive haptic trailer for F1. I couldn't stop grinning and cackling the whole time.)

There are a few things in there – specific beats or moments or developments – that maybe I wasn't expecting. One of the most powerful scenes in the movie happens early on, where Brad Pitt's last-chance washout Sonny Hayes sits on a couch in his stupidly-expensive-looking dressing room next to his old friend and his Formula 1 team owner Ruben Cervantes, played exquisitely by Javier Bardem. They both have thousand-yard stares and the weight of the world behind them. Cervantes' entire future and fortune is riding on the gamble of hiring Sonny, and Sonny risks what little is left of his pride and possibly his health by signing up. They remark that there's no pressure, and then sit in horrified silence for a few moments, letting that hang in the air.

The other lovely surprise here is that F1 is very much a two-hander, with Sonny serving as the mentor and teammate of the young, cocky and talented Joshua Pearce, portrayed by Damson Idris in what should by all rights be a star-making turn. He plays the cocky upstart with a lot of nuance and manages to both irritate and charm the audience from scene to scene.

F1, of course, doubles as a lovely little bit of propaganda for Formula 1 racing, which has exploded in popularity in America in recent years due largely to the success of Netflix's Drive to Survive docuseries, which is both invoked by name in the movie and by appearances by many of the most well-known personalities from the show. (Perhaps the most well-known Formula 1 driver of all time, Lewis Hamilton, is both a fixture on Drive to Survive and appears in F1 – where he also doubled as a producer.) But I honestly couldn't care less about that when I'm also a huge fan of director Joseph Kosinski's prior blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, which, like its predecessor, is a massive bit of propaganda for the United States Armed Forces. Compared to that, what's a little synergy between sports movie subject and sports movie league?

Bonus points to F1 for managing to make an exciting and engaging two-and-a-half-hour movie about Formula 1 while managing to make its arcane and convoluted rules seem pretty basic at a glance. (At the end of the day, after all, the sport is about which race car finishes in first place, so handwaving all the intricacies which end up sinking their hooks into the F1 diehards is not just important, but necessary to making a good movie.) casting Tobias Menzies as a guy who will definitely not be a sleazebag and for giving him the name "Peter Banning," which is the name of Robin Williams' character in Hook.

The hook of the marketing for the movie consisted mainly of three things:

1. It's a sports movie starring Brad Pitt
2. It's by the director of Top Gun: Maverick
3. Brad Pitt is driving real F1 cars* in a sports movie from the director of Top Gun: Maverick

And that's all you needed. Luckily, Joseph Kosinski is an extremely good craftsman of action films (he also directed Twisters, Oblivion, and Tron: Legacy), and everyone in the cast, from Kerry Condon all the way down to the somehow sixth-billed Shea Whigham (who only appears in one sequence), gives it their all. The (seemingly) Trent Reznor-inspired score by Hans Zimmer ramps up all the requisite Sports Movie Emotion, the editing and cinematography is crisp and airtight, and the whole thing has the slick veneer to be expected of the subject matter ... and it all works so very well. You're rooting for the main character to succeed after being dealt such a bad hand (either by life or by himself) for so long, and the twists and turns along the way ramp up your enthusiasm to make it to the finish line with him.

Also, Brad Pitt's character has a hot dog finger guns tramp stamp.

Great movie, 10/10.

*Pitt was actually driving F2 cars with F1 body kits in the movie, but it all amounts to "something way scarier than I would ever agree to," so it's really just semantics at that point.