Three years ago, Tom Cruise starred in his $1.4 billion blockbuster epic, Top Gun: Maverick.
Given the film’s huge success and critical acclaim, it’s hardly surprising that producer Jerry Bruckheimer has attempted to repeat it.
Take the same director (Jospeh Kosinski), screenwriter (Ehren Kruger), composer (Hans Zimmer) and cinematographer (Claudio Miranda), a 60-year-old Hollywood hunk playing an aged maverick (Brad Pitt), mentoring a cocky young rookie (Damson Idris), while capturing the stars speeding along for real in their cockpits and you have F1: The Movie, the official Formual One film jointly produced by Warner Bros and Apple.
Sadly, despite all the right ingredients, this cynical ploy for another $1 billion ends up being more feature-length tech giant advert than Pitt’s Top Gun Maverick.
Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a 1990s F1 driver who missed the big time, roped in to drive for fictional bottom-of-the-table team APXGP, alongside Idris’ Joshua Pearce. The Hollywood star brings something of his smirking, caravan-dwelling Cliff Booth from his Oscar-winning performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to the film, offering a few titters of humour here and there. Clashing heads along the way with the rookie and Javier Bardem’s team owner, he seeks to woo Kerry Condon’s tech director Kate, while taking one last shot at the big time.
There’s plenty of 90s cheese here, and no doubt F1 super fans will get something out of Formula One cameos and the moderately entertaining race sequences. But the lack of stakes and 1-note shallowness of the script feels worthy of yet another forgettable $200 million Netflix B-movie. F1’s biggest crime is its overlong 2.5-hour runtime and shameless commercialisation, making the whole thing feel like a feature-length advert for alcohol-free beer and Middle Eastern airlines.
The sanitised, clean-cut Apple visuals and the never-ending, in-your-face product placement give the viewer a shuddering vision of the future of cinema. If anything, F1: The Movie could have been an AI requested “Make a Formula One movie starring Brad Pitt in the style of Top Gun Maverick.” At least the cheese and charm of the actors managed to just about keep our attention, but you could say the same for a Hallmark movie.
F1: The Movie hits UK cinemas on June 25, 2025.