Review: F1 (2025)

If the first half of the summer movie season belonged to a plane-jumping Tom Cruise on the eighth leg of his impossible mission, the second is now officially the dominion of Brad Pitt, whose racing drama, F1, blew away box-office expectations last week. Even before the pandemic, Cruise and Pitt remained–with the obvious exceptions of Denzel and DiCaprio–our last movie stars, holdovers from the 80s who have spent the intervening decades honing their craft.

But while Cruise abandoned name directors like Kubrick and PT Anderson a quarter century ago in favor of his own cadre of stunt-obsessed collaborators, Pitt continues to push the cracks in his movie star persona by working with the medium’s greats in everything from Babylon to Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. 

Though F1 is also the latest from Joseph Kosinski, the now A-List action director responsible for Cruise’s rescue of Hollywood with Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, it appears more an alternate take on that film’s pretty-boy masculine energy than an extension of it into the racing world. As never-was driver Sonny Hayes, Pitt possesses little of the antiauthority spirit that made Maverick the country’s last hope in Biden’s declining America.

Instead, he’s a misanthrope that fell too hard for his own myth, unable to come to terms with how his hubris caused the career-immolating accident that left him traveling the amateur circuit. It’s his duty to former teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem) that pulls him into the Eurocentric world of F1 where he has little regard for the pretensions of Young Turk JP (Samson Kayo), who luxuriates in the media attention. 

Its unparalleled racing sequences and instant-classic summer movie soundtrack aside, F1’s most impressive feat is rewriting the western with Pitt’s Hayes as the reluctant hero who rises above his personal foibles toward the realm of American greatness. The same week Donald Trump and his charm offensive left the NATO crowd calling him daddy, Pitt returned Hollywood to its unapologetically American heyday. If the last week is any indication, things are looking up.

F1 is now playing in theaters.