7/10 stars. Woke nonesense: none

Its is heartening to see that Hollywood still has the ability to make fun, high octane (hah!) entertaining movies again. I thought only Tom Cruise seemed to be able to make fun movies that people wanted to see anymore.

Anyways, in this flick we get to see Brad Pitt play a retired driver coaxed into making a comeback by a desperate Javier Bardem, former rival (30 years ago) now GM of a last place, sad sack race team. He can’t talk anyone into taking the #2 car in his lackluster outfit, turning to Pitt out of desperation.

Sound like a familiar plot? Of course it is. Its a retread; (car pun!) You have seen this story several times before. But of course, if you have seen one rom com, you have seen the plot of every other one ever made. * So lets not worry about the story, but how enjoyably Jerry Bruckheimer and Brad Pitt have turned it into a cool racing drama.

In this case, I think they did a very good job. I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite it being overlong, at 2.5 hours. I confess, I am an F1 race fan so I may be biased here. But being on board to watch race cars hit the straightaways at 180 miles an hour is exciting.

The movie would not be much to care about except for the great performance by Pitt. He is one of my favorites, has virtually always turned in carismatic and convincing performances. Here he is less convincing as a burn out, but very convincing as an authority of race cars and team tactics. He is the gas that makes F1 go.

His team mate is an unconvincing and uninteresting actor named Damson Idris. I had never seen him before, and see no reason to seek him out after this tepid performance. I find him unconvincing as the overly brash driver, with a huge ego despite always finishing last. Of course there is conflict with Pitt added to the team, and a reconciliation later. Kind of a racing bromance. I know, nothing new here. It would have been fine if Idris was a more interesting actor. He either bored or annoyed me.

As a side note, Idris’ character does not have racing super model groupies hanging all over him. Instead, he is portrayed as a momma’s boy. His mom is almost always in the scenes with him. This robs him of his masculinity and elan, another reason his performance fails to impress. Lousy writing and plotting. Missed opportunity to flash some legs, too.

Bardem is fine but has minimal on screen impact. For fans of chicks in guy flicks, Kerry Condon portrays the engineer of the cars. Also Pitts love interest. At first she is uninterested, but is there anyone who doubted he would wind up in the sack with her at some point? That would be a spoiler alert but really, there was never a doubt here.

Anyways, I really enjoyed this movie. If you are a guy who likes action movies, or gals who either like them also or still like watching the master hearthrob deliver a fun performance, go see this one.

‘* Plot of every rom com: Boy meets girls cute, romance ensues, boy screws up and girl dumps him, he grovels and wins her back. Cue “here comes the bride”.