Movie Review: F1: The Movie (2025)
Review: 🎬 F1: The Movie (2025)
There are movies about winning, and there are movies about the cost of having once believed you were destined to. F1 belongs to the second category. Joseph Kosinski's F1 starring Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, tells the story of a once-promising Formula One phenomenon who returns to the sport decades after the racing world moved on from him. Hayes joins a struggling underdog team alongside an upcoming rookie Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris. Idris does a good job of portraying Pearce as the team anchor with raw talent and an inner picture of himself that is grander than the results of the team, the type of leader that lacks the experience to fulfill his potential.
What makes F1 more than a sleek piece of motorsport is that it understands racing as a drama, not merely as spectacle. This is not simply a film about who crosses the finish line first. It is a redemption story about men trying to outrun the stories they have told themselves or the stories that others have told about them.
Sonny Hayes is someone that is more interesting than the usual grizzled veteran. He is a man who has stopped confusing bravado with confidence and has shifted his whole outlook to mastery. Hayes is not merely older, he is wiser in the precise way disappointment can make a person wise. Pitt's portrayal of Hayes reminds me of his work as Billy Beane in Moneyball, not because the two characters behave the same way, but because both men understand the hidden architecture beneath competition. Billy Beane looked at baseball and saw inefficiencies. Sonny Hayes looks at racing and sees possibility. He is not a romantic, at least not on the surface. He studies the angles, calculates the risk, stacks the odds in his favor. That is what makes him compelling.
Hayes does not race for the money, and the film is quite clear that financial reward means little to him. He is not hungry for fame but maybe hungry for resolution. Hayes is a former prodigy who did not live up to expectations. Sonny is called "the greatest that never was," a phrase that hangs over the film like a private accusation. He is superstitious and steeped in ritual, something that offers depth and caution to lost potential, that is the emotional anchor for F1.
He wants the result. He wants, perhaps for the first time in his life, to bend fate towards himself instead of surviving it. Life interrupted him, and time moved on. The world recalibrated without asking permission. His journey back is not one of ego but of redemption, the movie is smart enough to understand that redemption is only meaningful when it is sought for the right reasons.
Across from Hayes is Joshua Pearce, the team's hotshot rookie, a young driver of talent, ambition and a little too much certainty. The film gives us the old dramatic pleasure of watching youth and experience size each other up. Their relationship is part rivalry, part mentorship, part collision of worldviews. It has the familiar tone of a Rocky and young Creed, or Lightning McQueen and Doc Hudson, those stories in which competition and teaching become tangled together until each character becomes a test for the other.
What makes the Hayes-Pearce dynamic work is that neither man is simply right. Pearce brings speed, swagger and the impatience of someone who believes the future belongs to him. Hayes brings strategy, caution and the bruised intelligence of someone who knows talent alone is not enough. Pearce thinks winning proves who you are, while Hayes understands that winning usually depends on recognizing who you are not and putting in the work.
Their rivalry becomes compelling because it is never purely adversarial. Hayes sees in Pearce the version of himself that once believed instinct could solve everything. Pearce sees in Hayes, what starts out as a, has been, never was dinosaur who has no place in his house, to a future self he would rather not imagine, one where talent is not enough to guarantee fulfillment. The tension between them is not just competitive; it is existential. They are racing each other, yes, but they are also racing together, against time, disappointment, and inherited fear. Through this tension Pearce and the whole team comes around to learning from Sonny. This gives Sonny a gravity that allows the team to rally to him and develop trust in his approach and vision while they battle so many external factors about the teams losing streak and the support of the owners.
Javier Bardem's Ruben Cervantes and Tobias Menzies' Peter Banning do more than sit in the background as team leadership, they actively shape the tension that drives the story forward. Ruben is the believer, a former driver who understands that racing is as much about instinct as it is about calculated risk. Bardem gives him a quiet urgency, a man holding the team together with optimism that feels increasingly fragile. Menzies, however, operates in a different register altogether. His Peter is not openly antagonistic, he is cooler, subversive with his own undeniably transactional agenda that moves through the film quietly. He speaks in the language of performance, optics and outcomes, and it becomes clear that his allegiance is not to Hayes or even to Ruben, but to control and self-interest. Where Ruben bets on people, Peter hedges against them. What makes his presence compelling is the suggestion of something withheld, decision made off-screen, motivations that only reveal themselves in retrospect, alliances that seem to shift depending on the result. In that sense, Peter is less of a villain than a strategist playing a longer game, and his outwardly support of Ruben & Sonny is coupled with a quiet resistance for the team.
Kosinski, does not fall into the trap of creating a mastery of machinery and movement and real physical gusto, where the best parts of the film are about the speed. He uses the racing scenes are a method to advance the characters by providing a code about decisions for when to push and when to hold back. When to sacrifice position now to gain advantage later. In that sense, F1 is less a film about velocity than about judgement. The cars are fast, but the storytelling is about patience.
And then there is Hans Zimmer's score, which is one of the film's quiet triumphs. Zimmer composed the music for the film and the score does something valuable, it knows when not to dominate. In a lesser movie, the music would announce every emotion as if trying to win its own race. Here, it complements rather than competes. Much like the speed, it is noticeable, but never intrusive. It moves beneath the film like pressure beneath a calm expression. Zimmer's music mirrors Sonny Hayes himself, controlled, restrained, and emotionally subdued but unmistakably alive, intense with a quiet confidence that belongs. It gives shape to what remains unspoken. In the racing scenes, it builds tension not simply by magnifying speed but by underscoring the suspense of choice. It understands that in racing, as in life, the crucial drama often lies not in motion but in restraint. This is not surprising for a Kosinski film, as he has used the same masterclasses of balance in Top Gun: Maverick & Tron Legacy.
If the film follows some familiar beats, that is because redemption stories often do. We know, more or less, where such stories are headed. But the destination matters less than the way the film arrives there. F1 earns its sentiment honestly. It does not ask us to admire Sonny because he was once great, it asks us to care because he still has enough left in him to become whole. That is the difference.
F1 is, finally, a redemption story for all the right reasons. It is about a man who once had every reason to believe the world was waiting for him, and then learned the world had moved on. It is about another young man who has not yet learned that lesson. And it is about the strange, necessary grace that occurs when rivalry becomes respect, and experience discovers that it still has something to offer. This is a film about racing, but more than that, it is a film about what happens when a man stops chasing applause and starts chasing meaning. Sonny Hayes does not want the money. He does not even seem to want glory in the usual sense. He wants the outcome to know that the race meant something. And in its best moments, F1 convinces us that it does.
“F1” is a racing film that understands something many sports movies never quite grasp: speed is not the subject. Choice is.”
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