Brad Pitt's New F1 Movie Sure Sounds Like Stallone's Driven
The pitch for the upcoming Formula 1 film from Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski sounds familiar to fans of the Tom Cruise-led blockbuster: retired F1 racer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) comes back well after his prime to mentor promising young driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) at a struggling team. Unfortunately, that premise is also familiar to anyone who has seen history's least-celebrated major auto racing movie, Driven.
If you are not familiar with Driven, the film stars Sylvester Stallone as retired CART driver Joe Tanto. He comes back well after his prime to mentor promising young driver Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardue) at an underperforming team. There is a lot more to it than that, most notably an all-time nonsensical car chase scene in a movie that is already about closed circuit car racing and a brutal 14 percent on RottenTomatoes, but the skeleton sure looks similar to what Kosinski's project promises.
Of course, Driven is not the only movie to play on a mentor-prodigy relationship. Stallone himself starred in and helped write an excellent one in the Rocky legacy sequel Creed. What makes this new movie more Driven than Maverick is the choice to actually have the mentor racing at an age where a return is unrealistic for anyone but Mario Andretti. Pitt is 59. Stallone was 54 when Driven was filmed. The oldest current Formula 1 driver, Fernando Alonso, is 41. The oldest IndyCar driver is 48-year-old Helio Castroneves, but he is already three years into his movie-perfect second career arc as an Indianapolis 500 winner for an upstart team.
Despite concerns about the actual concept, you should still have some hope for the Pitt film. While the plot similarities scream Driven, the better comparison point for the Pitt movie is probably Days of Thunder. Just as this is a spiritual follow up to Maverick, Days of Thunder was a sort of dream team reunion of the original Top Gun team. Also like Thunder, Kosinski and Pitt's conversations with the press indicate that production has been focused on a Top Gun-like commitment to capturing the feel of both driving an F1 car and participating in an F1 weekend. That movie is nobody's idea of perfect, but its 37 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes is more than double the score Driven could reach.
No matter what you might expect, remember that authenticity only matters so long as it produces a good film. The point of racing movies is not to promote auto racing or pander to an audience that already loves it. The point is to make a memorable film that a general audience will enjoy, regardless of the subject. Ford vs. Ferrari used California Speedway for Daytona and Road Atlanta for the Circuit de la Sarthe, but it did so as part of a world class production that resulted in an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. Kosinski's follow-up to his own Oscar-nominated Top Gun: Maverick, this Formula 1 movie which is either still untitled or called Apex, will hopefully take that lesson to heart.
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