The Top Gun-to-officially-licensed auto racing pipeline is alive and well in the year 2025. After turning fighter pilots into a generational box office hit in 1986, the late Tony Scott reunited with Tom Cruise to make the NASCAR-set racing drama Days of Thunder just four years later. It’s hard not to think about those two films when watching or talking about F1 The Movie, Joseph Kosinski’s new effort from Apple and Warner Bros.
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Kosinski and Cruise helped bring movie theaters back from the brink of extinction with Top Gun: Maverick in 2022. Just three years later, the director made the same move as Scott, taking the techniques and gravitas he harnessed with a Top Gun sequel and applying them to the world of Formula 1 racing. It’s Brad Pitt instead of Tom Cruise, and NASCAR has been traded for the most popular form of auto racing around the globe, but the themes and styles hold true from the days of Scott’s high-speed run. Just like the late action legend did with Days of Thunder, Kosinski recaptured his Top Gun magic for a spectacular racing blockbuster that already feels destined for timelessness.
F1 stars Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a driver who was one of the world’s hottest racing prospects in the 1990s, but a near-fatal crash ended his Formula 1 career just before it could really begin. He has spent years living on his own and traveling the United States as a driver-for-hire, taking on different challenges only to move on once they’ve been conquered. He’s approached by a former teammate (Javier Bardem) who owns a struggling Formula 1 team to replace their second driver for the remainder of the season. It’s a Hail-Mary play for the team that has nothing left to lose, as anything short of a miracle will result in the board forcing a change in ownership, likely putting the jobs of every crew member and employee in jeopardy.
The grizzled lone wolf is partnered up with the team’s young star driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who operates with a chip on his shoulder and has to navigate the season knowing the final nine races are essentially an audition for the job he’ll need when the team is inevitably acquired. He’s stuck between trying to help his team win and trying to ensure he has a future in the sport he loves. Hayes and Pearce are products of different places and different times, leading to clashes that you can see coming from a mile away. Meshing the renegade, nothing-to-lose antics of Hayes with the modern approach of Pearce will be the key to saving the season, as well as the team’s future.
As you can probably tell from that synopsis, there’s nothing groundbreaking or even all that new about the tale being told in F1 (written by Ehren Kruger). It’s a very simple concept featuring familiar tropes and storytelling techniques, but that simplicity is one of F1‘s greatest strengths.
This is a very straightforward saga about an elder outlaw faced with the end of his career and a passionate young buck looking to make his mark. We’ve seen this everywhere from classic Westerns to Pixar’s Cars franchise, though Kruger and Kosinski are well aware that these characters are ones we’ve seen before, and that we probably have some clue as to how their stories might end. They harness that familiarity with F1 to keep our attention on the screen itself.
F1 is an audio-visual masterwork. Like Kosinski did with Maverick a couple of years back — and similar to how Scott put viewers right into the thick of NASCAR action with Days of Thunder — F1 sends you on a ride that few films could dream of. The first scene drops you right into the night shift of the annual 24-hour Rolex 24 race at Daytona International Speedway, and you know within a couple of minutes that what Kosinski has cooked up is the real deal. Engines roar all around you, fireworks light up the sky, and it’s as close as 99.99% of us will get to actual professional race car driving. The cameras mounted within the cars haul you through tight turns, and the editing is exceptionally engaging.
The racing will envelope you, and that achievement is paralleled by a cast full of great players who all bring their A-game. Pitt is obviously the heavy lifter and he delivers on every element of that old-school, movie-star performance that the pictures used to get built around. He chews his scenery and spits it back out in every scene, with the swagger only a talent of his caliber and age can. He’s older now, and that experience is what makes him (and Sonny) feel so damn cool. It helps that Sonny’s tale does seem to mirror that of Pitt’s, as an elder statesman who throws caution to the wind for the love of the game. As Pitt transitions into a stage of his career where he won’t have his looks or seemingly perfect health to fall back on, he has to wrestle with how much he’s willing to give the job — and how much it may or may not love him in return.
Idris is a marvelous foil for Pitt, allowing Pearce to evolve and learn from Sonny while gracefully getting across the point that he is, in fact, a future worth betting on. Bardem is as good as always and Kerry Condon is an absolute scene-stealer in the role of the team’s lead engineer (and Sonny’s potential love interest). And I can’t talk about the performances in F1 without mentioning the work of character actor extraordinaire Shea Whigham, who only needs to appear in all of two scenes in the opening 10 minutes of the movie to deliver a character you’ll still want to talk about when the credits roll more than two hours later.
F1 has far more in common with a film like Days of Thunder than just a director’s journey from fighter jets to race cars — this is a throwback blockbuster in every sense. The plot is a bit thin when you look at it on paper, but that works to its benefit because the familiar stories and characters are so expertly executed that it’s easy for us to lean into the warm, nostalgic feeling. The action is innovative and potentially ahead of its time, almost guaranteeing an audience that will continue growing for decades. There’s a bona fide movie star dripping with swagger, surrounded by near-perfect performances from rising stars, respected veterans, and the best character actors in the game. It’s also a movie that’s a bit longer than it needs to be and contains just a few moments that make you feel the 2.5-hour run time.
If you’ve ever said “they don’t make ’em like they used to” about modern movies, F1 is going to be your dream come true. This film was plucked straight out of the early ’90s and reworked with all of the incredible movie-making technologies at our disposal today, destined to be both a staple for physical media collectors and an eternal rerun on TNT that no dad will be able to turn off.
F1 is a product of two eras at once, and I’ve got to believe Tony Scott would love it.
Rating: 4 out of 5
F1 The Movie lands in theaters on June 27th.
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