I had heard many wonderful things about F1, and Joseph Kosinski’s more recent successes helped me believe that this was one to anticipate. There were, however, two red flags that caught me by surprise. The first was “Jerry Bruckheimer Productions”. The second was “Screenplay by Ehren Kruger.”

Javier Bardem plays Ruben Cervantes, a former race car driver who’s now the owner of Formula One Team APXGP. Trouble is, APXGP hasn’t scored a single point in literally their entire existence, Ruben is $350 million in the hole, and he’ll likely be forced to sell the team if they keep on losing this badly. As a direct result, Ruben has been throwing money at a ton of flashy desperation plays in a flailing bid to survive and stay relevant. (By the way, did I mention this is a WB picture?)

For one, he hired Kaspar Smolinski (Kim Bodnia), a decorated (albeit slightly fossilized) F1 veteran to serve as principal and lead strategist for the team. Then Ruben went and hired Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), making her the first female technical director on an F1 team. Most notably, Ruben hired Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a hotshot rookie driver who knows perfectly well he’s only auditioning for some other team to pick him up after APXGP implodes. More to the point, Ruben is clearly headstrong and inexperienced, so Ruben reaches out to an old friendly rival to make up the difference.

Enter Sonny Hayes, our protagonist, here played by Brad Pitt. He was a massively talented race car driver up until a crash took him out in the ’90s. Ever since, he’s been driving as a freelancer, traveling all over the world for literally any job that will put him behind the wheel of a car. All while racking up a reputation as a reckless gambler and a serial womanizer, I might add. Ruben catches up with him, Sonny reluctantly agrees to come on board, cue the generational Sonny/Joshua conflict, and we’ve got our movie.

To sum up, we’ve got a threadbare premise (i.e. An underdog team of misfit losers has to win the championship or they all go bust.) and cardboard characters all acting out a predictable plot. In other words, it’s a Jerry Bruckheimer picture. Bruckheimer has long been known for making cookie-cutter pablum, and Ehren Kruger (as I’ve been saying for years) is an uninspired hack. No way is anyone getting anything novel or thought-provoking out of any film from these two.

Unless they just happen to get a director talented enough to make even these two knuckleheads look good. And Kosinski has already proven that he can. (Though he got a lot of help from Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie, but that’s another story.)

This movie lives and dies on its kickass racing scenes. Kosinski pioneered new ways to photograph in and around fighter jets for Top Gun: Maverick, and that experience pays massive dividends in shooting in and around Formula One cars. The coverage and editing are fantastic, the action is dynamic, and the film does so much to highlight the strategy and psychology involved beyond “drive really fast.”

Quite notably, a significant part of what makes the driving sequences work is in how well the lead actors can perform when their entire bodies are strapped down and immobilized inside a car, their helmets and uniforms covering up so much that they can only emote with their eyes. Which brings us to the strength of our cast.

While Condon is stuck playing a perfunctory love interest for Sonny (Seriously, there’s no reason why this character needed a romance arc aside from Bruckheimer’s expected formula.), at least Condon has the chops to play the character with enough fire to keep her interesting. And of course Bardem has done so much more with so much less than what he’s got with Ruben. Again, while Ruben’s actions are wholly predictable and formulaic, at least Bardem has the charisma to make the character feel more important than he actually is. I might further add that Bardem and Pitt act superbly well off each other, which helps a great deal.

Which brings us to the central conflict between Sonny and Joshua. On the one side, Joshua is an arrogant preening dickhead who’s only out for himself because he knows he’s got a future beyond this crappy team. Compare that to Sonny, a career nomad who’s never stuck around long enough to be part of any team, and nobody trusts him anyway because he’s a washed-up loose cannon.

Joshua is all about the endorsements and social media presence, the press appearances, and so on. Again, a lot of that has to do with making himself visible and attractive to other prospective teams. But a lot of it has to do with his cousin/manager (“Cashman”, played by Samson Kayo), another preening dickbag who spends all his time hyping up Joshua so he can ride some coattails and get some of that money, liquor, women, luxury goods, and so on.

By contrast, Sonny couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of him. Literally all he cares about is coming in first place and moving on to the next race. Nothing else — not the fans, not the press, not the complaints from his teammates, not even the trophy at the end — matters. If it doesn’t get him in first place and onto the next challenge, it’s all just noise.

In summary, what we’ve got here are two shitheels who spend the entire movie learning from each other, challenging each other, and taking each other down a peg. It’s cliched stuff, but Pitt and Idris — with significant help from Condon in one pivotal scene — keep it entertaining and they make the development arc work.

Moreover, this is inherently a movie about an underdog team of losers figuring out how to win the Grand Prix. We’ve seen this a million times before. But what’s interesting here is that every single person on the team is competent, they’re all good at what they do, but they don’t have the leadership necessary to work together as a cohesive unit. It’s really kind of pathetic that Ruben — the multimillionaire with a history as a professional race car driver — should be so pitifully bad at team leadership and conflict resolution.

Instead, it’s Sonny who forces everyone to rally around his unorthodox maneuvers and immovable stubbornness. Remember, Sonny doesn’t care about money or popularity. And with his years of experience, he’s acutely familiar with the rules and how far they can be bent or broken. I might further add that as a longtime gambler, he’s an expert at reading his opponents and playing with their heads. And of course we can’t forget that APXGP have literally never scored a single point in their whole existence, so nobody’s expecting anything from them, they have nothing to lose at any rate, and it’s been demonstrably proven that they can’t win the game if they try to play like everyone else. (See also: Moneyball, another sports film with a Brad Pitt protagonist)

The end result is a character who gets highly confrontational with his opponents in a way that reshapes his team and the entire game around him. In turn, this adds new layers to the character drama and the racing scenes. Great stuff, in execution.

F1 gets by entirely on presentation. Kosinski, Pitt, Idris, Condon, and Bardem are all on fire, but the rest of the film around them is flimsy at best. As much as I love the racing sequences and the interplay between our leads, I can’t bring myself to look past the dull supporting cast or the paint-by-numbers plot in this uninspired screenplay.

The film is a turd, but it’s a turd wrapped in such immaculate gold plating that it demands to be seen on the big screen. I can give it a recommendation on those grounds, but keep your expectations well-adjusted. This is no Oscar contender (it shouldn’t be, at least), and it’s not great cinema, but it’ll suit you just fine if an adrenaline rush is all you’re after.