The cool quietude of Brad Pitt’s leading performance and the central presence of cars make F1 immediately feel like an ancestor of a Steve McQueen vehicle. Not one of his better ones, though: the roteness of its storyline, feeling like it’s there mostly because its makers know a film ought to consist of more than just racing, and the blandness of its characterizations reminded me of Le Mans (1971), which too was most of all preoccupied with on-the-track flash and feels interminable.
Le Mans was at least shorter than two hours. F1 piles on one-after-the-other sports-movie clichés for nearly three. You know where this one last hurrah-style movie is all leading pretty close to right away. Pitt’s character, Sonny, courted Formula One glory in the early 1990s before prematurely backing off after a nearly life-ending accident in 1993 left him with a long and thick spinal scar the film’s cameras regularly visually caress while he works out. He’s spent the years since gambling and vacillating to and from small-scale competitions with so-so paydays while living out of a converted van that’s seen better days.
Sonny is coaxed out of F1 retirement by an old teammate, Ruben (Javier Bardem), who now owns a team orbiting around a talented but too-in-his-head rookie, Joshua (Damson Idris), who’s put it on a losing streak that’s long past being a little bit embarrassing. Ruben thinks Sonny, still blondly youthful and tautly muscled in a way probably only the supposedly not-yet-greying 61-year-old Pitt could be, can turn the team’s luck around, much to the cocky Joshua’s chagrin. And he will, though not until there’s a succession of exciting, smoothly edited races that largely see tantalizing near-victories rather than official ones.
Damson Idris and Brad Pitt in F1. All F1 imagery courtesy of Apple TV+.
The vivid execution of its racing sequences makes F1 a good commercial for the sport for which it’s named. But also like a commercial, F1 superficially draws whatever happens off the roads, its cast so set in their stock types that if we ever learn more about them beyond what’s guessable, it spills out in inelegant exposition, as if it hit its screenwriter, Ehren Kruger (who also co-penned Kosinki’s last big success, 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick), that it was overdue to provide someone with the character development they’d at that point lacked.
Pitt’s avuncular tension with Idris feels obligatorily hot and cold; his chemistry with Bardem, another actor who’s gotten hotter with age, wouldn’t suggest their characters have known each other for more than 30 years unless we were explicitly told so. I also have, after what I’ve read about some of the goings-on in the final moments of Pitt and second wife Angelina Jolie’s marriage, soured on his presence in a way that influences how I see him and how convincing I find him onscreen, a place where he again and again is cast as quietly soulful and maybe misunderstood. (With F1 and an allegiance to actors like Tom Cruise and Josh Brolin, Kosinski has a track record of valorizing the screen images of actors with documentedly troubling personal lives.)
Pitt’s taciturn acting style here is much like McQueen’s: this enviable dose of sure-of-himself control is also a little boring to watch. Pitt has range though often embodies the type of aloof hero he does in F1; when he does, it usually plays more effectively, as the critic Alison Willmore recently pointed out, when he has livelier foils to play against. Nobody in F1 — not even his team coworker slash love interest played by Kerry Condon, who’s energetic but not given anything that interesting to do beyond providing Irish-spitfire vim — helps to get that sort of productive dynamic off the ground. F1 overarchingly echoes what its star is here: very pretty to look at but not much else.
M3GAN 2.0‘s title character lost in thought. Photo by Geoffrey Short/Universal Pictures.
Killer-robot movie M3GAN (2022) was healthily in on the joke in the way the latter-day Child’s Play movies were, leaning into the silliness of its premise without having to strain too hard to be ludicrously funny. Its gratuitous but ultimately worth having sequel, M3GAN 2.0, has a higher rate of laughs per minute than its predecessor, which is accomplished, in part, by trading the horror-movie flavors of the original for more-receptive-to-quippiness action-comedy ones. It sees the eponymous deadly gizmo (played by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis), who looks like a glowering American Girl doll, brought back from the dead by her maker, the now-staunchly anti-AI Gemma (Alison Williams), in order to battle a lithe android named Amelia (Elizabeth Olsen lookalike Ivanna Sakhno). The cyborg, whose name is naturally a wordy acronym, was engineered by the U.S. government to serve as a combat weapon but has since gone horrifyingly rogue.
Aside from its stretched-too-long climax and a stupid plot twist that surprisingly makes the movie seem discordantly pro-AI after all, M3GAN 2.0 posed much goofy summer-afternoon fun on the day I saw it. Most of its laughs derive from the discord between the title character and the often illogical woman who made her; writer-director Gerard Johnstone (who helmed, but didn’t scribe, the first movie) has a way with bitchy barbs that can make his hyperintelligent anti-heroine sound like a wire-stuffed progeny of a Dynasty character. Much like the original, whose plot points I still struggle to fully remember, M3GAN 2.0 will promptly be forgotten, but it’s the rare sort of forgettable movie that manages to make a sequel sound not so bad, particularly now that we know a system reboot can prove a boon for a dumb good time.
Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Petunia Pig in The Day the Earth Blew Up. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
In a movie where, as expected for anything Looney Tunes branded, the faces and limbs of human and anthropomorphic-animal characters alike are miraculously stretchy like putty, there’s a certain harmony in having a villain who weaponizes bubblegum. Specifically a concoction that, when smacked, turns the person exhausting their jaws into zombies that can be mind-controlled. The antagonist responsible for it, simply called The Invader (voiced by Peter MacNicol), is bulbous-headed and the color of a radioactively contaminated lime, and has come on a sleek ship from the bowels of outer space ostensibly for the purpose of colonizing Earth.
Making sure that villain can’t see his dastardly plans through is not something one would particularly want to task the famously incompetent Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza) with taking care of, but that’s nonetheless what happens in The Day the Earth Blew Up, an exuberantly funny new Looney Tunes movie I regrettably somehow missed when it was given a wide release to less fanfare than it deserved in March. (It was just made available to watch on HBO Max.)
What one looks for when they watch something Looney Tune-related — pretzel-limbed, lightyears-a-minute physical comedy; tongue-in-cheek dialogue that sometimes dips into charming self-reference; imaginative, funhouse-exaggerated animation overall — is all here. The style perfected during the brand’s Hollywood Golden Age-era heyday is dutifully maintained but with a sheen of contemporary visual polish. I could watch 50 more movies like The Day the Earth Blew Up, especially now that the TV show from which it spun off is over, though its middling box office suggests I’ll probably be better off digging through the plentiful Looney Tunes archive to sate my appetite.
Peterson Reviews 