Granted, one key element in this respect remains money: the revenue stream from Top Gun: Maverick must have been so torrential that for perhaps the first time since the 2008 market crash, one of these tentpole-films can put the cash upfront on the screen; neither corners nor purse strings have had to be cut. (One of Apex GP's sponsors is something called Expensify, which looks to have become the film's own watchword.) But to the three big Ms here (men, motors, moolah), we can add a fourth: maturity. Unlike those Marvel movies that clogged up the multiplex in the years since 2008, Bruckheimer isn't exclusively targeting kids, teenagers and manchildren; the film's driving line is that, much like his producer, Sonny Hayes has developed a nous - crowdpleasing instinct, coupled to acute technical and logistical skill - far beyond that of those upstart MBA punks trying to conjure big summer hits out of third-string comic books. F1 is the first blockbuster since 2023's Barbie to have been pre-empted by songs from a tie-in soundtrack album, as so many of Bruckheimer's films have since Flashdance; the aim has apparently been to revert to that more packaged (and perhaps reliable) blockbuster model so in vogue in the Eighties and Nineties heyday of the multiplex popcorn counter, covering a lot of quadrants while offering something for everybody. F1 may have a Ferrari or McLaren engine, not to mention endless cameos from drivers whose faces will mean nothing to those of us who refuse to spend our Sunday afternoons watching men driving in circles, but they've been welded into the chassis of a DeLorean: boxy at two-and-a-half hours, roomy in the space it affords both its occupants and audience, and recognisable as some sort of movie time machine. We're being driven back to the future at speeds well in advance of 88mph.
The steering involved in that struck me as falling somewhere between reactionary and judicious. Bruckheimer is lucky in the respect that Formula 1 presents as a land before DEI, which permits the film to swerve those culture wars that did for several recent Disney/Marvel imaginings: this really is just 26 men, one or two of whom happen to be Black, putting pedal to the metal, so the hope is that nobody need get too riled up. The inclusive spirit comes through elsewhere. Kosinski, like Scott before him, is clearly a hardware nut with some flair for shooting speed: it's not just the cars that catch his eye, but the simulators, gadgets and medical testing equipment, all state of the art and gleaming items of kit. Left to his own devices, he'd likely make something as overdesigned and fundamentally hollow as 2010's Tron: Legacy or 2013's Oblivion. But Bruckheimer is a people person; you figure he possibly has to be to get close to knowing what audiences want. His best productions have showcased Hawksian ensembles, corralling different personalities, energies and viewerships, affording us the pleasure of spotting favourite actors in the mix, often doing fun stuff: it's why Michael Bay's Bruckheimer films (The Rock, Armageddon) remain pleasures of some kind, and why Bay's post-Bruckheimer work has largely been unendurable.
Beyond the duelling leads here, there's a veritable old pros' club: Bardem, working small human wonders with a role that mostly requires him to remove his glasses, rub a rueful hand across his face and sigh; Kim Bodnia as the pitlane chief who gets a memorable meltdown amid one tyre change; Kerry Condon, sparky as the wary technical director with whom Sonny locks eyes. (Bruckheimer's Anglophilia, which landed Christopher Eccleston and Ian Hart major studio paycheques in the 1990s, manifests in roles for Samson Kayo as Joshua's business manager, Tobias Menzies as meddling new money, and Simon Kunz as a hack reporter.) Idris, making a step up after the small-screen success of Hulu's Snowfall, more than holds his own in such seasoned company; as for Pitt, well, given everything we now know about his personal life, we may have to concede this is one of those individuals who just work on a movie screen, removed from any of the gravity and responsibility of reality. It helps that he's one of the few sixtysomething performers on Earth who might credibly pass for late thirties, surely the upper age limit for any F1 driver, even for a team whose collective tyre treads are wearing thin. Yet much like Bruckheimer, Pitt has also long since figured out what looks cool on camera: taking a long gulp from a waterbottle while an irate rival rants and rages, tossing a rubber ball around these polished sets in an apparent homage to Steve McQueen, the new movie's patron saint. (The coolness that might prove infuriating to loved ones - the laissez-faire attitude, the odd, shrugging gesture - works perversely well on a screen: it draws us in, despite ourselves.)
Among Bruckheimer's hardy crew of veterans, the one weak link might be screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose career (Scream 3, three Transformers movies, the Americanisations of The Ring and Ghost in the Shell) has largely involved assembling scrap metal, if not outright junk. F1's tech talk is generally po-faced (one notable miss from blockbusters past: the stellar script doctors who once punched and jollied this stuff up), and its raceday setpieces, which lack the Hot Wheels madness of even the more routine Fast & Furious stunts, lean heavily on patched-in headset chatter to modulate the stakes, which feels something of a cheat. (They're also blighted by persistently unpersuasive commentary: Brundle either needed better material, or better direction.) But Kruger gets enough of the basics right. The combative Sonny-Joshua pairing - two boxers; more sport - sometimes suggests 48HRS. at the Le Mans 24 (or F1 equivalent): the old white guy and the young Black contender, an extension of the Apex team's monochrome branding. And it's rather sweet that this plot gives not a fig for the business of driver points or constructor championships: these characters do it for the love of the sport, for those days when - after pile-up upon pile-up - it all finally comes together in a flying lap. Just on a philosophical level, F1 remains from green light to chequered flag very likable - or more likable than expected, given the copious gas guzzling, the endless product placement, the big finale in Abu Dhabi (capital of sportswashing, capital of capital), the never-lifting fug of dadness the whole project exists under. (It is, ultimately, Barbie for dads.) It may be a retrofitting rather than any radical overhaul: all straight lines and straight men, as self-contained as any race, it goes fast, then lets us go home without worrying what's next. It can't match Top Gun: Maverick for throwback thrills; even Cruise couldn't do that with the final Mission: Impossibles. But it's a clearer and more enjoyable run at this kind of material than Days of Thunder: 35 years on, Cole Trickle's ghost has finally been exorcised.
F1 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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