Ladies and gentlemen of Gen Z, allow me to introduce you to the retro ‘80s action movie stylings of mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer: Note the use of bombastic, practical visuals that pound a metal stake through your brain! The pounding Hans Zimmer score coupled with carefully selected ‘70s-era FM standards!The sweeping helicopter/drone shots from up on high down to a specific detail! The familiar throughlines of all the characters, and the comfortably predictable plot points that coalesce in the most obviously crowd-pleasing of ways!
Still, we come here not to (completely) bury Bruckheimer’s predictably over-the-top impulses, but rather to (faintly) praise the expertise and craft that has come to produce a mostly welcome throwback sort of summer action extravaganza! I might not have imagined feeling this way back in ‘95, but some thirty years later? I think there’s ample room for Jerry’s brand of hyperbolic amplitude as an antidote to the usual mindless summer tentpole regurgitations and superhero frolics of the modern era. It’s time to take it back a notch or two, with some added vroom vroom thrown into the mix.
Director Joseph Kosinski has found a niche working with aging leading men who reflect on their growing mortality while still kicking everyone’s ass in the process. 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick packed audiences in to witness a throw-back action flick filled with practical effects as Tom Cruise delivered a solid performance returning back to one of his most famous roles.
Here, Kosinski pairs with Brad Pitt, who plays Sonny Hayes, a once promising race car driver on the precipice of Formula 1 immortality before a devastating crash resulted in his having to pull back his signature aggression, leading him ultimately to divorces, bankruptcy, gambling addiction, and dissolution.
Hayes still races effectively, as the movie opens, he’s leading a successful charge at Daytona, doing all the hard work overnight so the lead driver can bask in the glory of the win, but he’s largely unfulfilled and floating in the wind. Enter Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), his former F1 partner, now leader of his own floundering team that’s running very much in the red, and unable to win a single point this season. He convinces Hayes to join up with him back in Formula 1, to punch up his squad, and maybe show the ropes to promising rookie Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris) in the process.
It doesn’t take long for Hayes, who moves cocksure and without compromise, to ruffle the feathers of the existing racing team, including race director Kaspar (Kim Bodnia) and head designer Kate (Kerry Condon), as well as Pierce, who, along with his agent, Cash (Samson Kayo) and willful mother, Bernadette (Sarah Niles), is trying to navigate these tricky waters and get to a winning team before the stink of this season ends his career.
But before too long, Hayes’ provocations and strategies prove helpful to the team, as they start etching out points for making the top ten finalists in various international races on the tour. As well they might, with Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies), a snake-in-the-grass board member of Cervantes financial backers trying to bring ruin upon the team such that he can take full control over it and turn it into a cash cow with Hayes leading the way to his personal glory.
Cruise and Pitt find themselves at similar periods in their illustrious careers, at the tail end of their being leading action heroes, but Pitt has always been more vulnerable on screen than Cruise, who, since at least 1999’s Eyes Wide Awake never feels as if his character isn’t ultimately in control. Pitt, by contrast, revels in the lack of control his character’s pathways, like Hayes, a consummate role for him, whose past mistakes have cost him dearly (when asked by a nosey reporter if he’d like to be able to make some of those choices over again, he simply answers “Yeah”), but have also granted him a dollop of wisdom along the way.
There is literally nothing in this film you haven’t seen before, save possibly the amount of POV shots of the racing itself, which puts you very much in the, er, driver’s seat, as these races unfold, the action hurtling all around us (indeed, the opening salvo at Daytona features heavy doses of POV shots, with lightning quick cuts and angles, and literal fireworks, all behind a blast of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” just to set the pace), but the film is made with care, and, much like the formula for Maverick, its practical effects still have the ability to take your breath away, as it were.
The result is a loud, brazen bid for your entertainment dollar that also feels pretty well-earned, eschewing CGI gimmickry in favor of far more pulse-pounding practical effects. For racing enthusiasts, I imagine it simplifies and streamlines these complicated systems of engines and points, and racing strategy as it heaps up the action on the course (the races are also practically narrated by the announcers, who keep spelling out the action almost solely as it relates to Cervantes’ APX GT team), for the rest of us, it’s an interesting introduction to the sport, even if one that doesn’t leave terribly much for our imagination.
As the film leaps around the globe from race to race, culminating in Dubai, we get at least some sense of enormous amount of pressure on these drivers and their teams, with billionaire bank rolls pushing them beyond any sort of healthy boundary to win at any cost imaginable.
In some ways, Sonny’s trajectory recalls that of Crash Davis, Kevin Costner’s indelible character from Bull Durham: Nearing the end of his career, he’s learned how to live almost entirely within himself, to set his own personal goals and live like a vagabond to achieve them. When we leave Sonny, he’s back in his aging camper van, trolling around the U.S. in search of other driving thrills, a fitting epitaph for a man driven solely by the love of the sport itself. Having been to the mountain top, he’s vastly more interested in the climb than the final view.
