F1 The Movie: an amazing factory of clichés
Disclaimer: might contain spoilers. Read at your own risk.
I like racing and I like movies, so when they announced a movie based on the F1 universe I naturally got slighly excited. Not too much cause I can’t expect good things from Hollywood these days.
Coincidentally I was in Spa-Francorchamps when they were filming and we were lucky to watch the lap used in the film first-hand. The hype was not big around us, but it was interesting to see a dummy f1 car followed by an SUV full of expensive cameras mounted to it.
Spa-Francorchamps. It felt like a video-game. 2023.
When they officially changed the name from whatever to F1 THE MOVIE my spider-sense started tingling. My gut feeling was telling me that this would be a money-grab fan service, aimed at the masses and at the wave of new (specially North American) fans.
I’m fine with that, as long as the film is good, I give a free-pass to cheap & cheesy fan-service. When well placed, I even enjoy it. But, God, I was not expecting that rate of clichés per minute.
To name some from the top of my head:
- The Clumsy Hot Girl
- The back-from-retirement-John-Wick-style-handsome protagonist
- The unnecessary cameos (What the fuck was that Toto’s line at the end?)
- The Superstitious Protagonist (that obviously fucks up when he forgets his token)
- The Mediocre, easy-to-digest & forgettable dialogue
- The Redemption Arc: from asshole to - almost - likeable main character
- Brad Pitt banging the hot milf
- Rich man bad (it is never an Oil Magnate or an Oligarch nowadays, I wonder why)
- The Poker Therapy Session
- Brad Pitt letting the rookie win on purpose to make a statement
- Old School vs New Trends hyperboles
- The medium-expected ending, Michal Scott style. Not the most expected, not the least expected.
- The Strong Independent Woman who proves to the world she can win in a Male Dominated Field.
- This one needs some clarification: If the character was just a badass woman rocking at her job, that would have been amazing. But that line “I need to prove my ex-boss, my ex-husband blablabla I can build I winning car” made me cringe
- Top hits soundtrack
Surprisingly, not a lot of eye-candy shots. I give them that. All in all, extremely shallow and predictable. Good for turning off the brain and appreciating some beautiful shots of fast racing cars. I don’t know if I liked the idea of having real racing drivers and team principals in the movie. For me, it kind of broke the immersion and it created a weird feeling of being a cheap TV production.
Probably I’m not the target demographics and Drive To Survive Enjoyers could like this film better. Too North American, too vanilla, nice car shots tho.
5.5/10. Decent to kill some time in a long flight, which is exactly what I did.