One of the biggest laughs of 2025 appears at the very end of the closing credits for F1: The Movie: “This program contains product placement.” Boy, does it: A drama set in the world of Formula 1 racing represents an advertiser’s dream, with every inch of every international speedway — to say nothing of the racers’ uniforms and even the cars themselves — festooned with logos and trademarks and brand names. When two of the characters wind up in bed together, I found myself looking for banners hawking Hims and Replens.
So yes, F1: The Movie contains more corporate branding than Josie and the Pussycats. Of course, in that film all the merchandising was meticulously satirical, while F1 itself is a piece of product. Director Joseph Kosinski, as we saw in Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick, loves a gleaming surface and a slick piece of machinery, and F1 is here to sell you the following: the glamour of international auto racing, the intensity of the IMAX experience, and Brad Pitt as contemporary cinema’s answer to Steve McQueen (who raced his way through Le Mans more than 50 years ago).
Kosinski gives Pitt any number of aging-golden-god close-ups, which Pitt is certainly enough of a movie star to use to his full advantage, but what F1 doesn’t give the actor is a complex character to play. Sonny Hayes is, we are told, a racer with a complicated past and regrets in his rear-view, and he’s also, somehow, right about everything, with a plot mostly entailing other characters figuring out that he’s right about everything. It might be “dad goals” to be that guy, but it doesn’t make for good drama.
Sonny, when we first see him, wins Daytona, which the movie shrugs off as a minor accomplishment at best. He’s ready to hit the road again when he gets an offer he can’t refuse from old pal Ruben (Javier Bardem); as youngsters, the two were Formula 1 teammates, but Sonny’s promising career was cut short by a major crash. Now Ruben is running his own team, one that’s flagging badly, and he brings Sonny aboard in the hopes that they can do well enough on the F1 circuit to see another season.
The hiring of Sonny ruffles a lot of feathers on Ruben’s team, from young driver Joshua (Damson Idris, Snowfall), less than enthusiastic about sharing the spotlight or taking orders from an elder athlete, to Kate (Kerry Condon), Formula 1’s first female technical director, who immediately butts heads with Sonny even though it’s obvious the movie is going to push the two together. (Pitt and Condon, separately, are very talented performers, but together, they create zero sparks; Sonny has more chemistry with Joshua’s mother Bernadette, played by Ted Lasso’s Sarah Niles.)
F1 doggedly follows the expected ups and downs of most sports-movie narratives, and it’s clearly more interested in recreating the experience of racing than telling a story or crafting a character piece. To its credit, this is where Kosinski shines: you might not remember any of the dialogue or plot beats from Top Gun: Maverick, but you probably remember the breathtaking aerial sequences. Similarly, the many moments where F1 puts us in the cars and through the grueling paces of competition are often quite thrilling, even if the constant yelling of race commentators explaining everything that’s happening wears thin quickly.
Those racing sequences reflect the kind of clockwork, big-canvas moviemaking that’s firmly in the wheelhouse of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, with cinematographer Claudio Miranda and editors Stephen Mirrione and Patrick J. Smith going all-in to make each race unique and exciting, and Hans Zimmer contributing an effectively unsubtle score that’s guaranteed to find its way into a lot of ESPN clip packages.
F1: The Movie is the film equivalent of a Waymo, a ride that’s all car and no human being. Viewers looking for a story of a past-his-prime veteran finding one last bit of redemption in auto racing, while also mentoring a younger driver and coming to respect the contributions of women to the sport, would be better off renting Cars 3.
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Screenwriter: Ehren Kruger
Cast: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, Kim Bodnia, Sarah Niles, Javier Bardem
Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Joseph Kosinski, Lewis Hamilton, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Chad Oman
Executive producer: Daniel Lupi
Cinematographer: Claudio Miranda
Production design: Mark Tildesley, Ben Munro
Editing: Stephen Mirrione
Music: Hans Zimmer
Sound design: Al Nelson, sound designer/supervising sound editor; Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, supervising sound editor
Production companies: Apple Original Films
In English
155 minutes
