It was only thirty-five years ago when producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson, fresh off the mega-success of Top Gun (1986), reunited with Tony Scott and Tom Cruise for the racing sports action flick, Days of Thunder (1990). It was a different era for Hollywood—the duo producers enjoyed Paramount’s five-year contract developing films similar to Top Gun, Simpson partied to excess befitting of nineties Hollywood, and charismatic talents like Cruise and Eddie Murphy from Beverly Hills Cop (1984) would emerge as prominent movie stars.
Now, time has ravaged these pillars of Hollywood; all that’s left are the imperfect, matured leftovers of a bygone era. Bruckheimer has continued to produce expensive blockbusters after both Simpson and Scott have passed, legacy sequels are all the rage as studios capitalize on fan nostalgia, and original blockbusters, high-octane as Thunder or Top Gun, are in short supply. F1® The Movie (2025) feels like a callback to that era of overproduced Hollywood spectacles—an original blockbuster with no pre-existing knowledge required upon entry, whose sole purpose is to entertain.
Instead of coked-out producers, we have tech giants like Netflix and Apple footing the bill for these films to be part of their respective streaming services. Oftentimes resulting in sterile, safe, and calculated blockbusters with the veneer of spectacle made for the small screen.
Thankfully, F1® The Movie doesn’t look sterile or lifelessly flat the way the majority of streaming flop-busters do—this is a film specifically made to be soaked and absorbed in the largest, oldest formats possible outside of your home. Yet, despite being acquired and made by Apple, the deliberateness in adhering to the Top Gun: Maverick (2022) narrative structure makes it feel like a calculated effort, hitting those traditional story beats.
The film is sincere when we simply focus on Brad Pitt racing inside a Formula 1 car, buzzing past competitors, or instructing his young rookie driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), and slightly glancing toward the camera with that affable sly smile, and charming movie star aura that’s been cultivated and mastered from being in movies for decades.
Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a racer-for-hire who bounces around from events, gracefully winning races, but never soaking in his victories, as we see in the opening 24 hours of the Daytona sequence. (Will movies stop underutilizing the great Shea Wigham?) An old rival, Ruben (Javier Bardem), a former F1 driver who manages a failing F1 Team, APXGP, asks for Sonny’s help before the team is disbanded by its board of directors.
Sonny is also tasked with guiding and whipping up the talented yet arrogant Pearce to be a team player by focusing on winning races, not the noise outside his box. Much like Cruise guiding Glen Powell and Miles Teller in Maverick, Pitt operates in great Hollywood sage mode; his assured ruggedness has made him a formidable presence in movies, much like Sonny’s experienced past. The crew’s Technical Director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), refers to him as “lone wolf” before she admonishes his perceptions, reminding Sonny of the collaborative effort F1 racing involves. Kate is tasked with pushing the expectations of what a garbage car they’re driving is capable of, as she modifies their vehicles to be built for speed, not safety.
For a film stretched to two-and-a-half hours, the narrative spins its wheels in overwrought conventions and formulaic cliches, making it feel far more conventional. All the car crashes, fireworks, and camera whip pans can’t hide the nakedly barren script written by Ehren Kruger, which posits itself as a cross-generational truce between the experienced wisdom of a veteran driver and a cocksure, social-media-obsessed rookie with a lot to prove.
Kosinski has always worked as a slick image-maker, having a tremendous background in architecture and computer graphics before transitioning into film. His films don’t offer a window into Kosinski as an artist, but rather how to construct and sell art through a visual medium. Whether it’s Tron: Legacy (2010) or Oblivion (2013), his pristine aesthetic feels like a perfect auxiliary to the commercial sensibilities of Apple.
There’s no doubt Joseph Kosinski and his entire team of technical craftspeople—most coming off the stupendous success of Maverick—spent every single dollar allocated to them on the screen. For a reported budget of $200 million, this is a marvelous technical intersection of sound and image-making that trumps many mainstream movies. Much of the success is bolstered by Claudio Miranda’s immersive cinematography, placing the camera inside the car or mounting it on top to capture the high-speed energy of Formula One racing. These sequences recall his approach for Maverick by inviting the audience inside the closed, intimate spaces where life-threatening decisions are made in seconds.
The propulsive intensity is palpable, as you clench your fists and your body ripples from the thunderous sound design—Kosinski’s filmmaking has gotten hold of you. It’s the scenes outside of those races where the scope feels paper-thin, lacking the emotional core that spoke to millions of people in Maverick.
Kosinski and Kruger aren’t transforming the classic archetypes of the old-school weary hero with a troubled past, clashing with the undisciplined youngin’—they’re putting a fresh coat of paint, it’s certainly a dazzling-looking coat. But for such a bloated runtime, by the midway point, the racing sequences never reinvent themselves or break out of the construction of the way they’re shot, resulting in feeling ordinary.
Stephen Mirrione’s slick editing does as good a job in enhancing the dynamism in the stringent framing of being confined in the cockpits of Sonny and Joshua’s boxes. The precise, exacting nature is effective before the sequences feel mundane and repetitive. What doesn’t help are announcer calls telling the audience what actions are happening on the track. The hyperrealist suspense that Kosinski aims to visualize is expertly crafted so that it can speak for itself without the usage of announcers’ exposition-dumping on how our leads feel.
The drama surrounding these set-pieces lacks the emotional momentum that Maverick wonderfully executed. The emotional crux resides in Hayes and Pearce’s inability to work efficiently on the track and how they conduct themselves with the team. The issue is that they aren’t developed extensively enough to convey enough layers to fit in a long runtime. Their petty squabbles and inner conflicts are hackneyed on paper, but the actors try their best to make their dynamic compelling through their performances.
Pitt is suave and charming as ever, never missing a beat and leaning into his movie star persona. While the screenplay contrives Sonny with a traumatizing backstory involving a near-fatal crash, Pitt’s endearing presence makes it palatable.
Idris is a lovely discovery. In what is a cliche on the page, he manages to make Pearce full of insecurities in a world where he has to fake a smile when the cameras are pointed. There’s a spirited energy Idris instills, and it’s a great performance to match Pitt’s screen presence.
Bardem looks and sounds charming as the one remembrance of Sonny’s past. He lights up the screen with enough swagger that he adds more dimensions to a character that could’ve been reduced to a corporate suit caricature by supporting and aiding Sonny through trials and errors.
Condon confidently matches Pitt’s haughty arrogance, as she’s tasked with reigning in the boastful personalities of Hayes and Pearce. Unfortunately, the screenplay forces a one-dimensional romance with Hayes, where the script initially maintains her boundaries and professionalism, sadly reduces her to hanging on his arms outside a hotel balcony like a giddy schoolgirl. The film wants to harken to cheesy romances of the nineties that develop with their main beautiful leads.
By positing Kate as independent and self-assured in her identity, all of that is lost by the third act to be in service of a manufactured romance that never blossoms organically. Alongside Kondon’s romance, a subplot involving Tobias Menzies plays a superfluous supporting character as Peter Banning, a board member trying to usurp Ruben’s authority and manage the team. It all feels like extra fat weighing down a lean machine of drive and propulsion.
F1® The Movie, at its core, is about simple delights. Seeing and hearing cars race around a track, swerving and outmaneuvering one another while trying not to crash. In the classical sense, it’s “old school,” and that’s not due to just having a grizzled movie star at the helm. There’s no saving the world from a CGI villain, nor is it asking you to have seen TV shows or previous movies to understand its context—it’s an in-and-out movie, like Maverick. Unlike Maverick, it lacks the emotional resonance it imposes on its viewer, especially when such a simple plot is over-extended to an unnecessary degree.
As Apple debates whether to keep dipping its trillion-dollar toes into theatrical exhibition or stay in the comfort of streaming, F1® The Movie feels like the most expensive commercial on the national stage for Apple–F1 racing that features real racers and figures, and forty million dollars worth of brands. Indeed, the days of crazed, drugged-out producers making wild bets on singular filmmakers with high-concept ideas are over. If Kosinski is the natural modernistic evolution of the Tony Scotts or Michael Bays of yesteryear, at least it’ll be a helluva lot of fun to watch his films in 4DX, even if they are slight.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros. Discovery via Yahoo
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