9/12 ForReel Score | 3.5/5 Stars

One of the most underlooked Hollywood markets in recent years is that of the Dad movie. As someone raised on the dad film canon, I've become something of an aficionado on everything that is dad cinema. We've had a taste of dadcore this year with Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant 2, a tried-and-true dad banger starring one of our most prolific dads on the planet, but is there a combo more dadcore than Brad Pitt, Formula One, and the team behind Top Gun: Maverick? Racing films are landmarks of dad cinema, from ‘90s classics like Days of Thunder to recent bangers like the Oscar-winning Ford v Ferrari, and for all intents and purposes, F1 (awkwardly subtitled The Movie) is the dad movie of the year so far.

Opening during the Daytona 500 with Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” blasting over roaring engines and booming fireworks, F1 almost reeks of uncut dad-ness. It’s got that classic Hollywood flair that hearkens back to golden-age films like Le Mans and Grand Prix, with the run-of-the-mill rookie vs. old-timer-underdog story being a far cry from reinventing the wheel, more so remixing it. Director Joseph Kosinski’s got a flair for throwback filmmaking while updating it to the modern day, with legacy sequels like Tron: Legacy and Top Gun: Maverick. Even his non-IP films, Only the Brave and Spiderhead, have that same classical feel to them. In layman’s terms, Kosinski is both the student and the master.

From a narrative perspective, F1 isn't anything you haven't seen before. Its self-aware adoption of common sports movie tropes would fall completely flat in the hands of a less-talented director, but F1 is so formally impressive that the exchange of thematic beefiness to technical prowess goes off without a hitch. Kosinski is going back to basics in the only way he knows how, and while F1 doesn't reach the highs of Maverick, it’s certainly cut from the same cloth. Is it something you've probably seen before? Yeah. Does it still manage to conjure something fresh out of the decade-spanning racing movie canon? Kind of!

In terms of cast, Brad Pitt is playing Brad Pitt (whatever that means for you) while everyone else around him is bringing their A-games. Contrary to his typecasting, Javier Bardem plays a surprisingly charming and regular guy, and his portrayal of a Formula One team owner leans heavily into the Moneyball-isms of contemporary sports – product placements and all. The standouts by far are Damson Idris, the arrogant rookie racer, and Kerry Condon, whose primary goal is to prevent Idris’ and Pitt’s characters from killing themselves or each other. Lewis Hamilton, who has a producer credit on the film, is held with a strangely godlike reverence that maybe I, an F1 newbie, might just not understand. They’re not necessarily working with Oscar-worthy material, but sometimes playing the hits with A-listers can get you results in some shape or form.

That said, though, once the talking stops and the cars start moving, F1 is up there with one of the most technically impressive racing films I have ever seen. The visual language owes a lot to John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, shooting on large-format cameras while mounting them to actual F1 cars moving hundreds of miles per hour. Kosinski’s cockpit whip pans and POV shots feel like a technical update to his work with cinematographer Claudio Miranda on Top Gun: Maverick. Between their work on Tron: Legacy, Top Gun: Maverick, and F1, Miranda and Kosinski are a truly formidable duo who always push the boundaries of digital filmmaking, whether that be in a video game world, an F18 fighter jet, or a world-class racecar.

There’s a merit to the dad movie and its place in the movie economy, and I believe that we need about two or three of them to maintain that healthy movie economy. The demographic of forty-plus-year-old men cannot be ignored, and as long as Joseph Kosinski is making movies, they will be well fed for years to come. For those who are not dads, F1 is a technically astounding and overall solid summer blockbuster, proving that Joseph Kosinski always delivers in one way or another. It may not be the Citizen Kane of racing films, but F1 is a damn good time that’ll have your dad hooping and hollering like it’s kickoff at the Super Bowl.

Movie Review: "F1: The Movie" Wins With "Dad Movie" Playbook