F1: The Movie – a fun but formulaic 'corporate tie-in'

You can't fault the logic behind "F1", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Strapping an ageing A-lister into a fighter jet for "Top Gun: Maverick" translated into megabucks at the box office, so why not hire the team behind that film, including director Joseph Kosinski, and get them to pull off another summer blockbuster, this time involving fast cars.

'Bone-dry'

Alas, anyone expecting the same kind of thrills will be disappointed: "F1" offers "the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all" of that earlier film's "giddy pleasures". In place of Tom Cruise's Maverick, our hero is Brad Pitt's Sonny, a former 1990s champion who is all washed up – until his former F1 comrade Ruben (Javier Bardem) gets in touch, and begs him to come to the aid of the failing team he now manages.

'Puppyishly charming'

You can guess what follows, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Sonny's "unorthodox" strategies pay dividends, and the team moves up "from the back of the grid at Silverstone to jockeying for pole position at Abu Dhabi's Yas Marina". So the film is certainly formulaic, but Pitt is "puppyishly charming", even if he does not achieve Cruise levels of magnetism; Britain's Damson Idris provides good support as an "impulsive" rookie; and though "F1" suffers for being a "corporate tie-in", it's well made and offers plenty of thrills, even for those who are not F1 fans.

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Yes, it is terrifically shot and edited, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. But the story makes little sense – our hero is so relaxed, cocky and brilliant, you wonder why his career was ever on the skids; and the film's attitude to F1 is so "fawning", it has the feel of a glossy promotional video. Indeed, it is so intent on being positive about Formula 1 and its milieu, there isn't even a "proper antagonist".