F1 and M3GAN 2.0 are in cinemas.
Just the two new cinema releases to report on this week as I decided that the others – Bank of Dave 2 and Karate Kid Legends – sounded too much like fake films invented just to get a laugh. Also, the scheduling challenges were insurmountable.
What’s left are symptomatic of cinema’s current trends. I read somewhere that we should be grateful for F1® because it’s original blockbuster entertainment that isn’t based on pre-existing IP. Um … its entire existence is due to the intellectual property of a giant motorsport organisation. Its purpose is to promote motor racing and its myriad corporate sponsors. And it shamelessly draws on decades of other sports movies, from Rocky to Bull Durham and beyond. Original, it is not.
But, effective it definitely is – at least when it’s out on the racetrack. I’m something of a rarity as a sports fan these days as I find Formula One to be like watching paint dry but I found the close-up access to all the cockpit and pit lane technology – and director Joseph Kosinski’s muscular direction – to be actually quite thrilling. It helps that the necessary exposition – commentators, closed circuit chat between the pits and the drivers – does a good job of keeping us up with what’s going on and reminding us of the stakes. It’s everywhere else that the film runs on soft tires.
Brad Pitt (59 at time of shooting) plays Sonny Hayes, a peripatetic multi-format racing driver, drifting from contract to contract. As a young man, he had been a big deal but a terrible crash in his first Formula One season put an end to his elite career. His former teammate, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), is now the manager of a struggling F1 team. If they don’t win a race by the end of the season, the team will be sold and everyone will lose their jobs.
Having to only win one race is a neat narrative trick when you need to include an entire industry of real world teams, cars and drivers without embarrassing them. If Ruben and Sonny can win a single race, it won’t be too damaging for the reputation of – for example – champion Lewis Hamilton (an executive producer on the film). All the real-life teams will still be the best.
Ruben wants Sonny to come out of Formula One retirement to help school the young and inexperienced lead driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). For movie fans of a certain age, Sonny is Kevin Costner and Joshua is Tim Robbins and Kerry Condon plays love interest and team technical director, Kate McKenna. Unlike with Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, there’s no love triangle here, but the romantic subplot is utterly redundant apart from allowing Pitt more opportunities to take his shirt off.
Pitt is something of a conundrum, here. Inside the car, it really could be anyone under that helmet and outside the car he tries to movie star his way through scenes but he’s looking for a sparring partner and never really finds one. He’s just not a strong enough presence to carry the whole thing any more and no matter how much back story Ehren Kruger’s script tries to load him up with, none of the emotional moments land.
Like the trackside commentators in F1, M3GAN 2.0 provides you with constant reminders of what is going on, only managing to interrupt the action rather than run parallel with it. Director Gerard Johnstone has written the script for this sequel to the surprise 2022 hit about an AI-driven children’s toy that goes rogue, and he doesn’t have the confidence in his ability to tell the story visually. This is a shame because he proved with the earlier film and the local hit Housebound that he is absolutely capable of doing so.
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It’s as if the filmmakers are assuming the audience will be bored and noodling away on their second screens and have to repeat everything for us. I was surprised at how bored I was at times between the (pretty good) set-pieces.
While the M3GAN hardware was destroyed in the last film, the M3GAN software appears to live on in the casing of a killer military robot named AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) who has gone rogue and appears to be looking for the first generation AI, a sentient photocopier from the 1980s. M3GAN’s creator Gemma (Allison Williams, also an actual p.g.a. producer of the film) has to reluctantly reboot M3GAN and hope that she can defeat AMELIA before all the AIs merge and cause a world-ending singularity.
This edition of M3GAN is more of a comedy-thriller than a horror-comedy, suggesting a future direction for the franchise, but it would be great if New Zealand could generate some more internationally recognised film stars1 so we don’t have to watch Jemaine Clement do another version of the same egomaniac he’s been playing for years.
Like its predecessor, M3GAN 2.0 was largely shot in Auckland and, while that means good well-paying jobs for local crew, New Zealand actors are mostly reduced to featured extra status.
