Four years after the original Top Gun — the most successful film of 1986 — the same creative team would try to recapture that success with 1990’s Days of Thunder, which centered around NASCAR racing. Known for being a troubling production that went way over-budget, Days of Thunder just felt derivative of the formula of not only Top Gun, but also every Tom Cruise picture from that era. While we recently got Top Gun: Maverick, which became the highest-grossing film of Cruise’s career, there has been talks on whether Days of Thunder would get its own legacy sequel, but until then, director Joseph Kosinski has already gone off to make his racing movie.
Instead of Cruise, Brad Pitt steps into the central role of the world-weary driver who has been through it all. A maverick in his own right, aging race-car driver Sonny Hayes refuses to retire, living out of his van and never staying in one place for long, bouncing from competition to competition. However, when he is approached by former racing colleague Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), who owns the APXGP F1 team, Hayes returns to the world of Formula One after thirty years, and race alongside Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a hotshot rookie who becomes his rival.
Considering the amount of racing movies there have been, whether based around Formula One or not, Kosinski and co-writer Ehren Kruger isn’t breaking any new ground with a narrative that is defined by the generational gap between two rivals and how ultimately they put aside their differences if the team is going to thrive at all during the season. There are also similar plot mechanics from Top Gun: Maverick creeping in, most notably the rebellious nature of its central protagonist that has an effect around those, for better or worse.
While F1 overstays its welcome with a running time that is over two-and-a-half hours long, it doesn’t dwell too much into a tragic backstory of a certain character, including the terrible accident that caused Hayes to initially lose his love for racing. Each member of the APXGP F1 team is trying to prove their worth as the rest of the world is against them, and following some disasters along the way, it is when they are on the same page, you are suddenly rooting for the underdogs.
Damson Idris may hold his own as the hotshot rookie who learns to grow, it is really his co-star’s movie. Known for his laidback charisma, Brad Pitt displays a lot of that here, which bounces well with the rest of the crew, like Javier Bardem who humorously stresses out for most of his screen-time. What could have been an underwritten love interest, Kerry Condon’s Kate McKenna, hailed as F1’s first female technical director, steals every scene she’s in, especially during one card game where she shows her dominance.
Considering the narrative conventions, most notably a villainous act that occurs in the third act of F1 , Kosinski does nicely balance it by pushing the envelope in recapturing the Formula One experience for those who are not as enthusiastic about the sport. Given the complicated camera work that applied to the jet spectacle from Top Gun: Maverick, the director and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda get up-close with the high-speed racing, stunning shot on IMAX cameras. No doubt Kosinski is piggy-backing with what directors Tony Scott and John Frankenheimer had achieved in the racing genre, but the spectacle has to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
