F1’s Stellar Racing Scenes Save Movie From Brad Pitt’s Bland Character

Joseph Kosinski’s F1 certainly is an adrenaline rush, although Brad Pitt’s character and performance don’t have the same energy as the rest of the film.

F1 is now playing in United States theaters. The film stars Pitt as a racing driver, Sonny Hayes, who returns to Formula One after a long absence. He’s back on the scene largely to help his old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), get his APXGP F1 Team into shape, which requires him to work with an up-and-coming rookie driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).

In its first weekend of release, F1 grossed around $144 million at the global box office — it hasn’t earned its budget back yet, but that’s a huge number that Apple Studios must certainly be happy with. How it continues to do in the weeks to come when it faces some Jurassic World and Superman competition remains to be seen, but a F1 sequel (or the Days of Thunder crossover that’s already been teased) is certainly in the realm of possibility.

We can only hope that, if a sequel were to happen, Pitt’s character isn’t as flat as he is in this movie.

Brad Pitt’s character drags F1 down

Brad Pitt is a movie star. There is no denying that. For decades, now, he’s graced the screen and portrayed all kinds of memorable characters: Tyler Durden, Rusty Ryan, and Cliff Booth, just to name a few. You hire someone like Pitt to work with Kosinski — a director who primarily seems interested in blockbuster spectacles, as he’s made stuff like 2010’s Tron: Legacy and 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick — and it should be a slam dunk. 

Sadly, though, Pitt’s performance in here is no slam dunk. While the script, itself, is far more interested in the fast-paced, breathtaking racing scenes than it is in character arcs or emotional drama, Pitt seems checked out of this one.

Sure, he was doing some of his own racing during production, and that’s cool. But whatever energy he brought behind the wheel doesn’t really add much to the rest of the movie; whenever there’s a dialogue-heavy scene in here, Pitt seems like he’s uninterested or not trying all too hard to sell it. His whole speech to Kerry Condon about why he loves racing should have some dramatic heft to it. Yet, it all comes across pretty wooden, perhaps due in part to the fact that the Condon/Pitt love story feels overwhelmingly tacked on.

How Pitt’s role could have been improved

The fault may not all lie on Pitt’s shoulders. Part of the problem with F1 is that Sonny Hayes is written as a character who can do absolutely no wrong whatsoever. The first race we see him in, he wins. He joins Bardem’s F1 team because he’s supposed to be their Hail Mary. Every race after that, he comes up with some unheard-of trick to help them do better. He butts heads with Idris’ character sometimes, but, by the third act of the film, Idris has largely had to adapt to Pitt’s methods while Sonny Hayes is the same as he always was.

There’s no real vulnerability to this character, no real personification beyond the fact that he’s always right about everything. Tom Cruise played a somewhat similar role in Top Gun: Maverick, but Cruise can sell that just by showing up and being himself. Brad Pitt is not Tom Cruise. They’re different actors with different vibes. He needs a character who is more fleshed-out and maybe a bit more eccentric in order for it to work. Having him play a very Cruise-like character isn’t really doing any favors for anyone.

Again, audiences are flocking to F1 because they want to see the racing scenes, and Kosinski delivers on those. But when the movie is 156 minutes long, you expect there to be more to it than just racing. Since it doesn’t have that, you really feel the runtime on this one.

If Pitt’s character had been given more of an arc or if there was some life in that performance, it could’ve been a more enjoyable ride. As it stands, the movie feels like it’s constantly starting and stopping without ever finding a consistent speed.

Source: Comingsoon.net