F1: The Movie

Warning: This post may have some spoilers for the movie. I’m not a movie critic so I don’t want to worry about dancing around spoilers.

In F1, Brad Pitt plays a washed-up driver named Sonny Hayes. Sonny Hayes is clearly a great driver and an angsty cool macho dude within the first five minutes of the film as he takes part in some sort of twenty-four-hour Daytona 500 Nascar Race. It's also clear he is a loser in some regards as he's living in a van. Sonny Hayes has to be the most athletic and most handsome man to ever live in a van. To be over fifty and look like that and live in a van is a testament in itself. Why is he living in a van? Gambling and divorces of course as we later find out.

As he's washing his clothes at a laundromat, because he lives in a van, an old pal (Javier Bardem) shows up and says he's $350 million in the hole with the crappy Formula 1 team he owns and wants Sonny to become a driver on his team for the final nine races of the F1 circuit. After Sonny goes to the diner and eats some pie and talks it over with an apathetic waitress, he decides to take up the opportunity, and the movies is off to the races.

F1 is a fun movie. I liked it and recommend seeing it in theatres. Its story is nothing new, fallen and flawed character rises from the bottom to reach their dreams, but that's fine, because it does everything extremely well. And the spotlight is not any actor or story, but the races, and the race scenes are for sure the best part of the movie. I don't know how they filmed them, but it's impressive. Even the Nascar race scene is great.

As we follow Sonny Hayes' ups and downs with his new team, you learn a whole lot about F1 that most people like me are not very familiar with. For me, F1 holds a similar position with international soccer competitions. I don’t understand the sport very much, but I love the pageantry and international aspect of it all. The movies takes place all over the world by following Sonny's new team across multiple races during an F1 season. Half the places they go to I couldn’t pronounce to you. I love that. The movie would display the location for a second and I'd turn to my buddy and pronounce the name silently and he'd shrug his shoulders and next thing we know we are on the racetrack again and it doesn’t matter where we are.

Within a couple of races, we quickly begin to realize Sonny Hayes is a madman. He is the Goon of F1, which was the biggest surprise I had with this film. A Goon being the controversial player in hockey known for starting fights, intimidating opponents, and protecting teammates. But this isn’t hockey, these are multi-million-dollar vehicles designed by rocket scientists, and Sonny is trashing them left and right. He completely disregards his team captains' orders and goes rogue with his "combat" style. He even holds the team hostage at some points till they eventually submit to go along with his style. Your cars suck and they're not fast enough so you need to make one for me to combat the other drivers on the turns, he says to the team's lead engineer.

The team soon fully embraces his way of driving, Javier Bardem is half a billion in the hole at this point I assume and desperate for a win, and they start improving. The biggest cost to all this though being Sonny's teammate driver (Damson Idris) driving too aggressively and spiraling his car towards the moon before landing off track and blowing up. An incredible scene which left me breathless, and yet somehow the driver is safe with only his hand burned. There’s a scene after this where the driver’s mom is super upset at Sonny for the crash, kind of like when Theoden is upset with Gondor for not helping Rohan when Gondor is also getting pillaged, and Sonny is thinking okay mom, this is F1, not Pop Warner, but everybody reconciles and the driver lives on and is back behind the wheel in three weeks.

F1 is great in that it fully captures an authentic F1 aura. Loads of real F1 drivers are seen and referenced in the film but none are ever given anything to say. I think that's a good call since they're not actors, but boy I had to imagine real F1 drivers would hate Sonny Hayes with a burning passion. I would have loved to see some scenes of the F1 racing community, especially the other drivers, trashing Sonny Hayes more for his Goon style of racing, or for his former experiences with Nascar and being a taxi driver. It's mentioned in one scene where Sonny is with the press junket that Sonny has been divorced twice, crashed out in countless races, has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling, and was even a lowly taxi driver at one point. There's a universe out there where Sonny Hayes is in that Rounders movie with Matt Damon playing underground poker around NYC and moonlighting as a taxi driver, likely terrifying passengers with his driving style. It’s not a hard leap to also imagine Sonny Hayes at one point taking up as an Uber driver (he was living in a van) before quickly flaming out with two-star reviews.

I ranted on Sonny Hayes a bit here, but don’t get me wrong, I like the character, and I like the movie. This is the magic of Brad Pitt, even when he’s not acting his hardest. His charm gilds so many issues with his characters and some of his performances. Brad Pitt is also underrated at playing assholes, which Sonny Hayes for sure is in some degree. And of course, in sports, often times you need a guy like that on your team as they say. I hope one day we can see Pitt go full Clint Eastwood Gran Torino and be an old miserly curmudgeon. Perhaps one day when he's no longer as handsome and can be the star of a multi-million dollar action movie.