You can’t fault the opening five minutes of this extended advertisement for the best-paid sporting franchise on the planet. The crunching riff of Whole Lotta Love kicks in as the veteran driver Sonny Hayes, in the near-inevitable form of Brad Pitt, splashes water on his face, slips a lucky playing card into his trousers and makes his way out to the 24 Hours of Daytona.
The action heats up and cools down as Led Zeppelin work through their audial simulacrum of copulation. Pitt doesn’t exactly light a fag and roll over afterwards, but you do get the sense that a bed has been well and truly unmade.
The rest of the film is, sadly, a great deal more civilised. Sonny, following his victory, demonstrates his world-weariness by making his way not to a pounding nightclub but to a laundromat where his old pal Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), now running an underperforming Formula One team, turns up to propose a Hail Mary pass.
Implausible as it seems, what he needs is a near-geriatric such as Sonny to complement the rogue antics of his young deriver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). Our hero had his moment in F1 but, psychologically and physically, failed to recover from a crash in the era of Prost and Senna.
F1 review: Kerry Condon injects Brad Pitt’s thuddingly predictable racing flick with a welcome touch of Thurles
Hot Milk: A heated affair, an overbearing Fiona Shaw and some shameful Irish sexuality
Four new films to see this week: 28 Years Later, Elio, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, and S/He Is Still Her/e
Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards – ‘I think I’ve got the wrong personality for this job’
Without cliches (or tropes, if you prefer), narrative art would have withered away before the ancient Greeks got into their stride. But F1 really is too thuddingly familiar for words. Drop a bowling ball off a cliff and you would be less sure of its trajectory.
It doesn’t help that the structure feels so close to the director’s previous film. Joseph Kosinski comes to the track straight after his deserved triumph with Top Gun: Maverick.
That was a film about a near-sexagenarian who spurned the taunting of younger men as he travelled very quickly in a high-tech vehicle. So is this. (There are also obvious echoes of Days of Thunder, the film with which Tom Cruise and Tony Scott followed up the first Top Gun.)
You know the hero. He is the grizzled veteran who refuses to play by the rules. He and the young gun start off as rivals but, as events progress, gain a class of qualified understanding.
There is, to be fair, a gap between the age Pitt presents and the great age we know him to be. Still, the youths floating around the 33-year-old Kevin Costner in Bull Durham treated him with greater disdain than do those sniggering towards the (at time of shooting) 59-year-old star here. And it’s much harder to get yourself killed in baseball.
No matter. We are in the world of high-end watch commercials. Literally so. All moving entities, including the actors themselves, are, realistically enough, plastered with so many advertising logos one can scarcely work up the oxygen to complain about product placement. And no product is placed so prominently as Formula One itself.
Great racing flicks of the past such as John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix made much of the death wish that then haunted drivers. In this film a “horrific crash” is one that leaves the driver on the sidelines for a week or two. After that opening surge the film settles for smooth relays that, though stirringly noisy on the big screen, don’t get you much closer to the actuality than highlights on the telly.
All the more reason to celebrate the casting of Kerry Condon as the team’s technical director. It may just be the home factor at work, but allowing the recent Oscar nominee to speak with her own Thurles accent injects a degree of reality into a project that otherwise seems no more grounded than a weekend in Monaco with the Grimaldis.
In cinemas from Wednesday, June 25th
