Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a folksy American athletics star is recruited to the U.K. to help lead a team for a sport that’s much more popular abroad than it is in the United States. It’s not even his specialty, but he just might have the guts and gumption to turn this rag-tag underdog team around, which may be sold if they don’t win. In doing so, he connects with his younger, diverse teammates, a blonde female superior, and tangles with the notoriously thorny English press. Give Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) a mustache and a “BELIEVE” sign and “F1 The Movie,” the Formula One racing film directed by Joseph Kosinski, is just a gas-guzzling “Ted Lasso.”

It’s also similar to “Gran Turismo,” the 2023 racing film directed by Neill Blomkamp, about a young Black British driver who has to overcome a terrifying crash in order to prove his skills and worth to a racing team. Damson Idris plays the young driver in “F1,” and Sarah Niles plays his overprotective mother, further cementing the "Lasso" comparison.

It’s no great revelation that sports movies follow a formula, in fact, it’s what we like about them: the agony and the ecstasy, overcoming obstacles, the triumphant victories. But the script for “F1,” written by Kosinski and Ehren Kruger, is painfully cookie-cutter, and side-by-side comparison does nothing for it.

Pitt’s Hayes is a version of his Oscar-winning “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” character, Cliff Booth, laid-back and sun-worn. The number of times he saunters into frame clad head-to-toe in denim, a satchel slung over his shoulder, almost approaches parody. We get it, the guy is the epitome of Americana cool, a real “Butch and Sundance” type.

Sonny is straight out of the ‘70s, living in a Ford van when he’s not behind the wheel of a specialty racing vehicle. He never steps foot on the track without his lucky deck of cards, and plots a course to the Baja 1000 on a paper map, for crying out loud. This anachronistically analog offseason quest is intercepted by old friend Ruben (Javier Bardem), who begs him to join his Formula One racing team in England, currently led by hotshot rookie Joshua Pearce (Idris), though they’ve fallen to the back of the pack. Can Sonny save the team and lead them to victory? Take a wild guess.

With Kosinski at the wheel, “F1” should be Pitt’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” but this land-bound racing film never takes flight, despite all the onscreen horsepower: the visceral, even grimy, cinematography by Claudio Miranda, and a seat-rumbling score by Hans Zimmer.

Perhaps it’s because Pitt’s easygoing screen persona doesn’t have the same level of sheer psychotic intensity that Tom Cruise brings to every endeavor (you just don’t buy Pitt as the kind of death-defying maverick Cruise can be). Perhaps it’s because Formula One racing remains a fairly exotic sport in the United States. Or maybe it’s just the formulaic (no pun intended) script, that has one too many training montages, one too many disastrous crashes, and takes too many repetitive laps around the track. By the time the film is careening toward climax, highway hypnosis has set in.

According to the scattered cheers throughout the audience at an early screening, Formula One fans will thrill to the cameos peppered throughout. For newbies, there is a steep learning curve for the rules and regs of this kind of racing, with regard to things like safety cars and strategic fender benders. Sonny rolls in with an aggressive style and an appreciation for chaos, which rankles perfectionist Joshua, especially because it actually seems to work.

The rivalry between the young upstart and the old vet provides a comphrensible conflict for “F1 The Movie,” which is why it’s frustrating when that’s resolved too early. As “F1” enters its final leg, there’s a fumble for a new antagonist, and every characters’ motivations are mushy at best. What should be the most thrilling and suspenseful sequence of the film — where we finally see the high Sonny’s been chasing all these years — is instead confusing and exhausting because the film ran out of gas 30 minutes ago. Coasting on fumes, it limps over the finish line at a bloated two hour and 35 minute run time that you feel every minute of.

Kosinski, an architect before he became a filmmaker, is a meticulous technician, and the filmmaking craft is top-notch. Idris is a fun young star who rises to the occasion opposite Pitt, who expends every ounce of his star power in this performance of a swaggering, Redford-esque hero (perhaps one of the last times he might convincingly pull that off). So it’s a real shame about the script — both muddled and predictable — which siphons any fuel that could have kept this thing running.

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'F1 THE MOVIE'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong language, and action)

Running time: 2:35

How to watch: In theaters June 27

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