Get yourself in the fast lane to your local theater to see F1, preferably in IMAX.
The two and half hour film could be Brad Pitt’s Top Gun: Maverick as the Formula One-set saga is brought to you by the same people– producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joseph Kosinski–who scored almost $1.5 billion at the box office for Tom Cruise three years ago.
F1: The Movie roars onto screens today after a worldwide publicity tour with pit stops in Tokyo, London and New York and advance screenings for tastemakers in cities across the United States.
It’s a high-octane adventure that grabs you from the opening moments when we see Pitt’s character, Sonny Hayes, waking up in a van before heading out to the racetrack, a scene made even more thrilling as it unfolds to the earsplitting lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s hard-rocking “Whole Lotta Love.”
The former professional driver is competing in 24 Hours of Daytona and helps the team to victory. After that, he grabs his paycheck and hits the road to Ensenada, where another race company is looking for drivers.
The cross-country journey takes a sharp turn when Sonny’s former teammate Reuben, powerfully portrayed by Javier Bardem, tries to convince him to join his struggling Formula 1 team as the second driver to rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).
The stakes are high. If the fictional APXGP can’t win one race, the board will fire Reuben and the team will be dissolved.
Despite is very real doubts doubts and flashbacks to his near fatal crash that ended his promising F1 career 30 years ago, Sonny takes the bait.
It’s a classic tale of an older professional trying to regain his footing and fit into a world that didn’t exist when he was in his prime decades earlier.
In addition to the thrilling cinematography that puts viewers in the driver’s seat going more than 200 miles an hour, some of the scenes that reverberate the most are about this intergenerational conflict between Hayes and Pearce, who has an added burden on his shoulders being one of the few Black drivers on the circuit.
Even with both of them underdogs, they have to work together – and it’s a rough road. The clashes are especially apparent during press conferences, when Pearce aims to charm the reporters and Hayes gives them the cold shoulder.
But there’s a softness to his character which we see through the denim on denim look that he sports whenever he’s not in the team’s white jumpsuit and helmet. It involves the head engineer on the team, played by Kerry Condon, whom we last saw in The Banshees of Inisherin.
This is a workplace romance that actually works. Their scenes together are another kind of Pitt stop, ones you wish might last longer.
Update: F1: The Movie raced to the top spot at the box office in its opening weekend, earning more than $140 million globally, including $55.6 million in the United States.
