Comparisons with Tom Cruise’s Top Gun are irresistible. Both films feature Hollywood superstars who get to show their age-defying abs and pecs. Each conveys the solitude of being in a cockpit while travelling at hair-raising speed, even though one is flying through the air and the other – Brad Pitt – is on a Formula One race track.
Even the poster brings to mind the famous pitch for Cruise’s first Top Gun film which only needed an image of the young star standing in front of a fighter jet while wearing aviator shades to be green lit.
Similarly Pitt standing in skin tight racing car flameproofs with hands on hips is presumably all director Joseph Kosinki needed to get his reportedly $300 million movie off the ground.
It couldn’t have been Ehren Kruger’s near auto-pilot script in which Pitt’s washed-up has-been racer Sonny Hayes is persuaded back to F1 by failing team owner and former driver Ruben (Javier Bardem) and is then paired with talented rookie Joshua (Damson Idris). Cue disrespect, then inevitable if grudging admiration.
The action sequences are terrifically well shot and like Cruise’s film convey the sheer physicality of sitting in the hot seat at breathless, bone-shaking speeds. But dramatically the stakes here at much lower. Away from the track the story is little more than a vehicle for Pitt to show his eyebrows can still rise in the middle.
If it is a racing car movie you want, look no further than James Mangold’s superb Ford v Ferrari starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale. Better actor, better shot, better everything. And Top Gun was better too.
