There's a connective thread between Gen X and millennials, and a hill we'll all die on: the '90s were better. Movies, music, TV, fashion, makeup, sports, slang, the housing market — you name it, we had it better growing up. Action films, comedies and horrors were nonsensical, brash and entertaining to no end. Rom-coms filled us with an emotional optimism that set our future romantic expectations at an unrealistic high. The dramas and coming-of-age flicks, especially the mid-budget ones, touched our souls in an indelible way without the overwhelming depression of similar films today.
Joseph Kosinski's latest film, F1, becomes a surprising analogy for the rose-tinted decade's cinematic legacy, flaws and all. It's loud, full of character, brimming with optimism, and has Brad Pitt — it's da bomb.
Like the great sports films of the freshest era of the 1900s, F1 features a lovable, down-on-their-luck athlete, Pitt's Sonny Hayes. A once-promising Formula One driver, Sonny's stepped away from the sport after a serious crash on the track. In the years since, Sonny's been working as a taxi driver, occasionally driving in amateur races, and, when we first meet him, lending his talents to a Daytona team.
As is the way, a wealthy old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), tracks Sonny down at a laundromat. Ruben's F1 team, APXGP, is failing, and he needs Sonny's help. They've never won a race, investors are on Ruben's ass, and while he has signed a talented rookie driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), he needs Sonny's experience to mature the young man.
F1 follows the predictable journey of the underdog, and in the best way possible. Pitt brings the same undeniable star power to F1 that Tom Cruise brought to Kosinski's Top Gun: Maverick, and quite literally drives the film forward with it. He's charming yet complicated, and lends Sonny a multifaceted character arc. For all he's accomplished in his career, Pitt somehow feels underrated as an actor, but, similar to the Cruises, and even Streeps and De Niros of Hollywood, Pitt has shown time and time again that his talents can sell a movie commercially and critically, and F1 is no different.
The film, written by Ehren Kruger, hits every trope-y waypoint that we've come to expect of an inspirational sports movie, and each pit stop is executed with formulaic precision. Kruger writes Joshua as the stereotypical arrogant young buck, concerned more with the money and fame than the competition and "love of the game" we're made to believe motivated the old guard. Idris brings the full punchability to Joshua, but unfortunately isn't given much more complexity than the cocky-to-learned odyssey.
However, the biggest sobering pierce to the '90s beer goggle veil comes from the treatment of Academy Award nominee Kerry Condon's Kate McKenna. Described as the first woman technical director of an F1 team, Kosinski and Kruger set Kate up as the lone female in a prominent position of a male-dominated industry. Kate's "first woman" standing doesn't form her entire identity, but it's certainly a pronounced part of her storyline. So when Kate suddenly becomes a giggling school girl at the whim of Brad Pitt's good looks and magnetism, it starkly recalls how unjustly women were often written in '90s movies. It's great the film makes room for a female voice that's older than 25 as a love interest and doesn't dress her down, but how far have we really progressed when part of her story — an entirely unnecessary subplot at that — involves her jumping into bed against her better judgment, because Pitt's just that dreamy?
Undoubtedly, F1 delivers on everything great about our favourite decade and elevates those elements using the technology of 2025 to create visually creative set pieces and a pulsating sound design that puts audiences right in the driver's seat. Films from the '90s have a distinct fingerprint that engenders a lot of happiness, and F1 has that joy baked into it.
By movie's end, I had a huge smile plastered on my face and left the cinema feeling light and excited for a genuine summer blockbuster. But Kosinski's film also reminds us that there's a reason we've demanded more from our movies and storytellers, and we shouldn't settle for less.