Brad Pitt and Damson Idris in F1: The Movie
F1: THE MOVIE
Why F1: The Movie debuted on June 27 rather than over Father's Day weekend is frankly baffling, given that I can't remember the last time a film was so objectively, overwhelmingly, a Dad Movie. Actually, I can. It was 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, which, like the new Formula One flick, was also produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joseph Kosinski, and shared with F1 prototypical Dad Movie tenets: a lot of fast-moving action; a lot of perilous danger (but no blood); a lot of manly guys doing manly things with the aid of a few token women; a few naysayers and authority figures receiving deserved comeuppance; a copious amount of sentiment; a wee bit of romance (but no on-screen sex); and a great-looking, middle-aged male lead who serves as his demographic's avatar without possessing anything close to a Dad Bod.
Of course, these attributes don't apply to all Dad Movies; Field of Dreams, The Shawshank Redemption, and the genre's stand-bearer The Godfather aren't exactly knuckle-tightening thrill rides boasting heroes with no discernible body fat. But it's still a pretty solid and successful recipe – regardless of gender, parents and non-parents alike frequently dig Dad Movies – and the big-screen spectacle F1 is pretty solid and successful, too, even though I can barely muster any enthusiasm for it.
Made in cooperation with Formula One racing, much the way Maverick was made in cooperation with the U.S. Navy (Dad Movies also don't like stepping on toes), Kosinski's latest casts Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a former F1 hotshot whose debilitating Grand Prix accident 30 years ago has left him working as a washed-up – but still gifted and hot! – racer for hire. Sonny, though, gets his chance at professional and personal redemption (another Dad Movie staple) when his old friend and teammate, Javier Bardem's Ruben, makes him an offer he can't refuse: a spot on Ruben's F1 team APXGP, currently positioned last in the World Constructors' Championship. The man Sonny will be racing with is British rookie Joshua Pearce (the enjoyably cocksure Damson Idris), a first-class driver and preening diva who bristles at the thought of an old man joining him on the team. Will Sonny find his redemption? Will Joshua learn to respect his elder? Will the last-place APXGP have a chance at actually winning the series-ending race in Abu Dhabi? You'll have to buy a ticket to find out!
Just kidding. The answers to all those questions are “yes.” You already knew that. What I'm struggling to come up with is anything you might not know about F1: The Movie, or at least correctly predict, even without benefit of sitting through its redundant yet rarely dull 155 minutes. Are the racing sequences exciting? For the most part, yeah. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda, film editor Stephen Mirrione, and the movie's exquisite crew of sound engineers keep the action brisk and loud and generally coherent, and Kosinski has so many cameras running from so many distinct vantage points that I half-expected a POV shot taken from the interior of Sonny's colon. Is Brad Pitt running a full-scale, reliably laid-back charm offensive? You bet he is, despite Sonny being one of the less interesting, more hackneyed roles on the star's recent résumé, and despite this enterprise being all but indistinguishable from a traditional Tom Cruise vanity project. (As with the majority of Cruise's myth-making efforts, I lost track of how many times Pitt wound up shirtless.)
What else can I say? Bardem and the other supporting actors are terrific, with Kerry Condon, in all her Irish glory, delivering crackerjack tirades, Sarah Niles providing warmth and grit as Joshua's mum, and Tobias Menzies enticingly skeevy as an APXGP board member whose friendly smiles radiate nefarious intent. (Further proof of the actual F1's close involvement with the film: None of the drivers or crew members, even on the opposing teams, are viewed unsympathetically – the money man is the only villain.) Screenwriter Ehren Kruger's narrative, as we should've presumed from the title, is pure formula, with the two APXGP drivers suffering their massive, massively inevitable speedway accidents precisely when you expect them to, and both surviving shoulda-been-fatal crashes with barely a scratch to mar their handsomeness.
Meanwhile, F1 fans will likely marvel at what I'm assuming are dozens of cameos by real-world champs – and you can't miss them, because the typically frenetic editing slows down enough for all of them to get their awkward two seconds of recognition. Like those it salutes, F1: The Movie does its job, and although I wasn't crazy about the film, I only actively resented it when its Maverick tendencies were abandoned in the final laps in favor of clichés from The Natural. That schmaltzy, irresistible baseball classic is another unquestionable Dad Movie, but despite the many decades of Redford/Pitt parallels, it might've been preferable had Sonny Hayes not so closely resembled Roy Hobbs.
M3GAN 2.0
Intentional camp is intensely tough to get right, and equally difficult, I'd imagine, is pulling off a horror-movie sequel that, unlike its predecessor, isn't a horror movie. James Cameron found a way to do the latter in his action blockbusters Terminator II and Aliens, and John Waters succeeded at the former all the time. But Cameron-ian and Waters-esque talent and invention are hardly suggested by writer/director Gerard Johnstone's M3GAN 2.0, a dismal followup that trades the 2023 original's shivers for unconvincing spy-thriller noise and its dark humor for obnoxiously broad, self-referential jokes. Beyond last fall's Joker: Folie à Deux, it's hard to think of another recent sequel to a Hollywood hit that gives us so little of what we enjoyed the first time around.
Because audiences, in a collective burst of good taste, have largely chosen to ignore this ill-conceived cash grab that finds the sentient, murderously faithful plaything attempting to destroy a taller, meaner automaton, I'll keep my own take-down brief. But seriously: When, and why, did Johnstone decide that “scary” was the wrong way to go here? Who thought it was a great idea to green-light a M3GAN movie in which the title character doesn't, indeed can't, kill anyone? How did this become potentially the first screen adaptation of a meme? (The doll dances; we groan.) And if I understood the plot to M3GAN 2.0 correctly, though I might easily not have, how is the main villain the one guy who wants to eliminate global AI takeover, and the happy ending unironic in its suggestion that humanity and machinery just need to mend their differences and work together in harmony? Is “Gerard Johnstone” merely an AI alias? So many questions. So few worth caring about.
