F1

I’m not really into sports, and Formula One racing is the sport that I have the least amount of knowledge on, other than the fact that I know Lewis Hamilton is a F1 racer, and he did show up in the movie too so that kinda helped lol. I’ve only seen very few sports movies in my life, so I was a little apprehensive about watching this one, but I did end up liking this movie even though I don't even know how F1 works. Of course this movie has the typical “sports movie” tropes. Sonny is the retired racer who gets back into it to help a failing team succeed and also to redeem himself for his past failure. JP is the cocky, arrogant newbie who cares about being the best but also cares about his ego, fame, and what people think about him. Even their approaches to training are different. They both learn new things; Sonny with handling modern controls and JP learning to just focus on racing and not what other people think of him.I really disliked JP in the beginning just based on how arrogant he was, but he started warming up to me when he started listening to Sonny’s advice, actually admitting fault to his accident, and even jogging with the whole team. I also liked Kerry Condon as Kate McKenna. I liked how she served as the mediator between Sonny and JP by playing poker together. I also like how she called out Sonny’s bullshit in the beginning of the movie; that was entertaining. It was also just seeing a woman have an important role in a male-dominated sport, and it was just cool seeing her design the upgrades for the car and testing them out. And after some research, I found out that it's actually based on a real person in Formula Racing, so that's pretty cool too. I was ready to write this off as “another sports movie” until I got to the scene where JP is flying off the track, where the sound cuts off and you see the slow-mo of his car flipping and crashing. That was when I started to become actually invested into the movie. I also did enjoy seeing the camerawork during the races, and kept wishing there was more of that, and eventually it paid off with the final race. I especially loved the part in the final race where JP and Lewis Hamilton crashed so Sonny could win the race, with him saying that he has many more races to win in the future. Seeing Sonny flying into winning the race was awesome, and it was just cool to see driving POV. It made me feel like I was flying too. This movie made me realize that I’m a huge sucker for underdog stories. Basically, the entire APXGP had something to prove because they were a huge failure in the beginning and Ruben was risking losing his team and losing his investors. Sonny had something to prove by showing that he’s still a good racer even after being out of the game for 20 years. Seeing everyone win and celebrate made me a little bit emotional and I felt like I was celebrating with them. One thing I didn’t like is that the reveal of the bad guy is the big bad board member who wants his team to fail so it can be sold, I just kinda felt like they needed to have a villain and just assigned someone to be the villain of the movie. I still liked this movie regardless. Overall, it’s just a fun movie, and I think people who aren’t into sports would still be able to enjoy it.