Movie Review

Brad Pitt auto racing film F1: The Movie has more vroom than story

Brad Pitt in F1: The Movie.

Photo by Scott Garfield / courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Apple Original Films

The sport of auto racing has been tackled in a variety of ways over the years by filmmakers, with the intoxicating ability of the cars to go super-fast often overriding whatever story they’re trying to tell. The Formula 1 circuit has been the subject of several films based on real drivers, and now it’s at the center of a fictional story in F1: The Movie.

Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) is an aging driver who lives an itinerant lifestyle, traveling in a van to whatever kind of racing organization will give him a chance to show his skills. Ruben (Javier Bardem), an old competitor from Formula 1 who now owns his own team, comes calling when the lead driver of his team gets injured. Soon enough, Sonny has joined up with the team halfway through their season, with rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) as his teammate.

The bulk of the film finds Sonny trying to impose his old-school ways on the modern sport, with crew members like Kate (Kerry Condon) and Kasper (Kim Bodnia) alternately bristling and marveling at his methods. Sonny and Joshua also spar, sometimes off track, but typically on, where the stubbornness of each threatens not only the success of the team as a whole, but also their safety.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski and written by Ehren Kruger, the filmmaking team tries to bring the same you-are-there feel that they did successfully in Top Gun: Maverick. And there’s no doubt that the film is at its best when it puts multiple cameras in a Formula 1 car while it navigates tight turns and speeds down straightaways, especially because it seems like Pitt and Idris actually did some of the driving. Even non-racing fans should come away impressed with what the cars and drivers are capable of.

Now, if you’re looking for any kind of story, you’ve come to the wrong place. The Sonny-Joshua rivalry has a bit of juice to it, but not much. Unlike most sports movies, the film rarely goes outside of the team, so there’s no antagonist to be found in the film. In fact, were it not for the presence of other cars in the various races, you’d think that Sonny and Joshua were the only drivers, with an annoying commentator constantly talking about them alone, even when they’re far behind the leaders.

The film also struggles with making the sport accessible for non-fans. With the winding courses the circuit uses, there’s far more to it than a car’s (and driver’s) ability to go really fast. The characters use lots of technical jargon about how the design of the car allows the driver to shave tenths of seconds off their times, but the filmmakers are not able to deliver that information in a manner compelling enough to draw the viewer in.

Pitt, as he’s been for more than 30 years, is a magnetic presence who knows how to play to the camera. Sonny is not one of his most interesting characters, but he makes the role work overall. Idris, best known for starring in the FX series Snowfall, makes the case for being the film’s breakout star, giving his character plenty of charm and cockiness. Bardem, Condon, Tobias Menzies, and other members of the team are cast well, even if the story lets them down.

As a showcase (aka advertisement) for the sport it depicts, F1: The Movie works relatively well, giving viewers a taste of what it’s like to actually be in a rocket on wheels. As a film, though, there’s not much to recommend, to the point that it almost negates any of the positives that come from the racing scenes.

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F1: The Movie opens in theaters on June 27.

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Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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