I’ll admit it — I’m emotionally invested in F1 enjoyment, regardless of however good or great or so-so it might turn out to be. I’ve read that it has issues, but I don’t want to play in that playground.
“F1 isn’t deep or layered or complex enough, dammit! Adrenaline highs are well and good, but we’re hoity-toity film critics, and and we want more. We want something that’s friskier and woolly-bullier and deeper and more emotional than a proverbial ‘dad movie’. Something that attempts the unexpected.
“Why wasn’t F1 directed by James Cameron of the ’80s and ’90s? Or by the Michael Mann of the ’90s and aughts? You know what we mean…by a director who’s more inward and contemplative and a bit less formulaic and synthetically-minded than Joseph Kosinski seems to be.
“Why couldn’t it have been directed by the Tony Richardson who made The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner, say? Or the Karel Reisz who made Saturday Night and Sunday Morning? Why are we stuck with a hugely exciting but very standard slam-bang vroom-vroom?” — the Rotten Tomato & Metacritic pissheads (Owen Gleiberman, Kevin Maher, Whitney Seibold, Ian Sandwell, Wiulliam Bibbiani)
From Gleiberman’s review: “There have been very good auto-race dramas, like Ford v Ferrari, centered around conventional macho-rivalry plots. That F1 flirts with cliché isn’t necessarily a problem; just look at how commandingly Pitt takes a character we’ve seen before and paints him with a fresh coat of rusty glamour.
“But what a movie like this one needs is for the drama to play out within the races themselves. That’s what happened in Ford v Ferrari, and in the aerial dogfights of Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick (which were shot and edited with bedazzling precision), and in the car-race film that raised this sort of thing to the level of art — the staggeringly underrated Ferrari.
“But as F1 sprawls across the Formula One World Championship, moving through the last nine Grand Prix contests of the season, the races generate a surface buzz, but the stories they’re telling are less than razor-sharp.”
HE to Gleiberman: I wasn’t totally floored by Ford v Ferrari, but I really like Grand Prix, and you’ve just called the non-racing portions of that 1966 John Frankenheimer film “late-studio-level claptrap.” The hell you say! The non-racing portions are assured and acceptable as far as they go, and don’t hinder the basic scheme.
