The real reason why Brad Pitt's embarrassingly bad, inauthentic donut of an F1 movie was doomed from the start, writes OLIVER HOLT

I went to see F1: The Movie on Saturday afternoon. Here’s my review: ‘Don’t bother.’

In fact, if you go anywhere near a cinema that’s showing it, cross the road before someone runs out and tries to drag you in. Forced capture is the only explanation I have for the fact the film is doing good numbers at the box office, in the States and in the UK.

I suppose I could write ‘spoiler alert’ at this point but there’s nothing to spoil. The script is embarrassingly bad and the plot is embarrassingly thin. In terms of cinematic worth, I got more out of Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. There was only one other person in the cinema where I watched and he walked out early.

I might be missing the point here. I accept that. I mean, it’s not as if any of us were expecting the next Goodfellas. I also accept I am not exactly the target audience. 

As someone who loves F1 and worked in it for a few years around the time Ayrton Senna was killed, no film is going to be as dramatic or as heartbreaking as the real thing.

Maybe it’s just that, after years of self-reverential puffery from people such as Sir Lewis Hamilton – who co-produced the film – and extravagant boasts about how much access the film-makers had been given and how authentic it was going to be, I’d set my expectations too high. I’ve corrected that now.

The truth is F1: The Movie is barely a film at all. It is closer to an advertorial, as uninspired and dull as its title suggests. At two hours and 36 minutes, it is two hours and 36 minutes too long but still manages to feel like a hugely expensive promo video that has a product-placement obsession where its soul ought to be.

And the idea it’s authentic? I’m sorry, that’s simply not true. I think, actually, that’s at the nub of what I don’t like about it. Its unique selling point – apart from Brad Pitt’s smile, which is what Mark Kermode liked about it best - is supposed to be its authenticity and the fact the film puts you in the cockpit with the driver.

And, yes, some of the racing sequences are quite dramatic but I don’t think they’re anything we haven’t seen before in TV coverage of the real thing. That is a huge tribute to TV coverage of F1, which is uniformly excellent.

But as I sat in that empty cinema, I kept thinking of a line from my favourite Brad Pitt movie, Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. It’s from the climactic scene where Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, who has taken LSD, is facing down members of the Manson Family in a house in the Hollywood Hills.

As Tex points a gun at him, Booth smiles and says: ‘You are real, right?’ And Tex smiles back and says: ‘Real as a donut, m**********r.’

And that’s F1: The Movie. Real as a donut. A piece of sugar with a great big hole right in the middle of it. Authentic? Do me a favour. The visuals might be exciting but they are utterly divorced from the reality of grand prix racing.

Authentic? What, like basing Pitt’s character’s story on Martin Donnelly’s horrific, sickening crash at Jerez during practice for the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix?

F1: The Movie shows footage of Donnelly lying on the track after the accident. In the film, Pitt’s character makes a glorious comeback. Donnelly never raced in F1 again. Authentic? I don’t think so.

It’s a problem that is far from confined to F1: The Movie but the issue that dogs so many sports films is that sport, real sport, is always going to be better than anything you put on the silver screen, however much money you throw at it. However dramatic you make a film, real sport is always going to be more dramatic.

So, sure, the action sequences in F1: The Movie might be technically accomplished but they don’t compare to the jeopardy of live sport.

They can’t get close to the smell of danger and the lurking presence of death that stalks every driver when they climb into their car and haunts every fighter every time they climb through the ropes and enter the ring. Sport is already the movies without having to make a film about it. Sports movies are just replays with fantasy added in.

Making a film about sport loses two of sport’s magic ingredients: its immediacy and its unpredictability. Maybe that’s why so many of the best sport movies are documentaries. Senna and When We Were Kings are the two outstanding examples.

They don’t try to kidnap sport. They don’t try to steal its magic. They don’t try to recreate something it is impossible to recreate. Documentaries make sport its friend, not its subject, and they work better for it.

A lot of my favourite sports movies, particularly The Big Lebowski, you might think are not really sports movies at all. Maybe that’s why I love them. I tend to think sports movies that try to recreate real sport are damned from inception.

Slap Shot is an exception to that. So is The Hustler. Both have Paul Newman in the lead role, too, which helps. Newman made a racing movie, too, Winning, which is up there with Steve McQueen’s Le Mans as one of the best of racing movies.

I wouldn’t have F1: The Movie anywhere near my top 10 sports films. I wouldn’t have it anywhere near my top 10 motor racing films. It’s not close to being as good as Le Mans or Rush or Days of Thunder. And that’s before we even mention Senna. If watching Brad Pitt smile can sustain you through two hours and 36 minutes of vapidity, go and watch it. If you want proper drama, watch sport.

How Saudi money backfired on Newcastle 

Newcastle United fans are notoriously touchy about any criticism aimed at the state of Saudi Arabia, which owns their club through the Public Investment Fund (PIF) and recently executed a journalist for posting on X.

But even they must see a bitter irony in the fact the PIF have effectively bankrolled the Club World Cup.

Chelsea, of course, are one of two English clubs to benefit from riches on offer in the USA and have promptly used some of them to snatch Brighton’s Joao Pedro from under the noses of their main rivals for his signature: Newcastle United.

Carsley shows England the error of their ways 

Many congratulations to Harvey Elliott, James McAtee, Jay Stansfield and the rest of England’s Under 21s, who won the European Championship in Slovakia at the weekend, so retaining their title.

It is an outstanding achievement for the players and also for the coach, Lee Carsley, who was in charge for both campaigns. The FA must be delighted with the job Carsley is doing.

Maybe, in the midst of their elation, they might give a thought to how they hung him out to dry when he was the caretaker of the senior team and then abandoned any idea of a pathway to the top job for English coaches by making Thomas Tuchel the successor to Gareth Southgate.

I wrote it then and I’ll write it again now: instead of lurching back to their swooning, star-gazing short-termism, the FA should have ignored Tuchel and given the senior England job to Carsley.