"Sneakers" and "F1": a two-fer review

L to R: River Phoenix, Dan Aykroyd, Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford, David Strathairn

"Sneakers" is a 1992 heist film directed by Phil Alden Robinson ("Field of Dreams," "The Sum of All Fears") and starring the recently departed Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell (I'd forgotten she was in this), River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, and David Strathairn, with a cute-but-corny cameo by James Earl Jones at the very end. Martin "Bish" Bishop (Redford) heads up a crack team of security experts, each with a checkered past, who get paid to break into secure facilities to test just how secure those facilities are. In 1969, Bish and his friend Cosmo (Kingsley) were busy hacking into government and specifically Republican databases, Robin Hooding money by stealing it and sending it to various liberal causes. The police catch Cosmo while Bish is out in the snowy winter to get pizza. As far as Bish knows, Cosmo died in prison. Fast forward to the present (the early 90s), and two shady individuals claiming to be from the government (Eddie Jones as Buddy Wallace and Timothy Busfield as Dick Gordon) ask Bish and his team for help in retrieving a recently invented item that turns out to be a universal codebreaker, a "black box" developed by Setec Astronomy, a name that is an anagram for "Too Many Secrets." Some members of Bish's team are hesitant at first, but the money is enough to persuade them. Bish enlists the help of an old flame named Liz (McDonnell), and the black box is eventually stolen from its inventor, mathematician Gunter Janek (Donal Logue), who later ends up dead. Bish begins to realize that this black box is something that all the world governments and shadier powers would kill for, and that the two "government agents" vying for the box are not who they say they are. In fact, they work for none other than Cosmo, whom Martin had thought deceased. What becomes of the box and of Martin's team of genius misfits is what occupies most of the movie.

I recall really liking "Sneakers" when I first saw it as a recent college graduate. Upon rewatching it, though, I saw it as a gently pious liberal fantasy from another era, one featuring quaint dial-up technology with implausibly fast decryption from the black box. It did, however, have an eerily prophetic message about where the world was going: toward the end, Cosmo rails at Bishop: "There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!" How utterly true. But at the same time, this was the sort of utopianist "nerds will control the world" thinking that people on the right these days have abandoned. Mix that utopianism with the anticapitalist, quasi-Marxist ideal of "no rich, no poor," and you get the movie's muddled ideological stance—which it doesn't even seem to believe given how fantastically rich Cosmo has become, not to mention the sort of bank that Bishop and his security-hacking team make through their exploits.

I had also forgotten that James Horner had scored the film; he gives the movie a peppy, lighthearted leitmotif that will stick in your head like an earworm, but because Horner was notorious for cannibalizing his own scores, you'll also hear elements of "Star Trek II,"  "Cocoon," "Brainstorm," and the later "Apollo 13." The acting from all the principals is fine; at the time, Redford was starting to look older, but he pulled off the role of a team leader quite well. Sidney Poitier has several scene-stealing moments as an ex-CIA guy, Crease, who is constantly worried about hidden threats; Dan Aykroyd plays Mother, a conspiracy theorist who would fit right in with today's QAnon people. McDonnell, with whom I've been quietly in love for years, is her usual, charming self as a music teacher with a deep understanding of music's mathematical dimension. If anything, I wish they'd made more out of that aspect of her character. River Phoenix is the young Carl Arbogast, a sort of thief-of-all-trades; the sight of Phoenix made me sad given the actor's early death and unrealized potential. And David Strathairn, as the blind Whistler, is hilarious and gets some of the movie's best scenes, including being asked to drive a truck as part of a rescue.

"Sneakers" is a fairly intellectual movie, and it showcases a quietly brilliant team dynamic as the various team members each contribute something to help solve a problem. Whistler helps Bishop figure out the location he'd been taken to when kidnapped by asking him questions about the ambient noises he'd heard while trapped in a car's trunk. Liz gives Bishop the basic facts he needs to understand the significance of the black box; Mother is the guy who breaks through various security measures with his tech knowledge; Crease is the scary muscle who's not afraid to pull the trigger if need be. The movie leaves a few loose ends, but those can be resolved in one's imagination as one teases out the story's logical implications. But the movie is never meant to be anything more than lightly cerebral entertainment; it's not an action pic, nor is it a gory horror flick. There's nothing intense or profound about it, and given the movie's final scene, it does wear its 90s-era politics on its sleeve. For the most part, I still like "Sneakers" even if it's very much a product of its time.

Brad Pitt and Damson Idris (who kept reminding me of a young Eddie Murphy)

"F1," by contrast, is a very different animal. Directed by Joe Kosinski, the same guy who gave us "Top Gun: Maverick," "F1" stars Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Tobias Menzies, and Javier Bardem. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, an aging racer who had severely injured himself years ago during the 1993 Spanish Grand Prix. Damson Idris is Joshua "JP" Pearce—young, arrogant, and extremely talented, but a member of a losing racing team called Apex (APXGP) whose owner, former F1 racer Rubén Cervantes (Bardem), has enticed Sonny to come back to Formula 1 racing in a last-ditch effort to keep his team from being sold out from under him. Also working for Rubén is Kate McKenna (Condon), the first female F1 racing engineer and a stereotypically pert Irishwoman. Following a pretty standard formula for facing movies, the old veteran has to convince the young lion to become a team player, all while tussling with his old friend Rubén and trying to woo the often prickly Kate—a task not helped by Sonny's own prickly nature. There are only a few ways a movie like this can end, so there's little need to offer any plot points or spoilers. Personally, I wondered whether Sonny would die.

I can say that, for all of its racing pizzazz—the intense camera work, the intense acting, and the sheer spectacle of the various racing venues—"F1" simply didn't hit me as hard as "Top Gun: Maverick," nor were the interpersonal relationships and rivalries quite as deep as those in "Rush," which was overall a better racing movie, or in "Ford v. Ferrari," which is probably the best racing film I've seen. This is despite the warm dynamic that eventually develops between Sonny and JP, the slowly thawing relationship between Sonny and Kate, and the rock-solid friendship between Sonny and Rubén. Despite all of these sources of potential warmth, something about the film felt a little cold and distant, and the constant on-the-nose dialogue of the race commentators (whose purpose was obviously to fill us ignorant Americans in on what is a hugely popular activity in Europe, where F1 reigns) often felt like a forced violation of the sacred show-don't-tell rule of writing. So I can't quite rave as much as Jeremy Jahns or The Critical Drinker about this film. It was good despite being about forty minutes too long, but it wasn't spectacular, even with the sight of the lovely Kerry Condon looking fetching while wearing nothing but a suggestive sweater and making me think naughty thoughts about pretty Irishwomen. But the preponderance of critics loved this movie, so don't listen to my opinion: go see it for yourself. I'd never call "F1" bad by any stretch: it's got solid acting, directing, and cinematography, and while the story fits the boilerplate pattern for racing movies, it's earnestly done and has its heart in the right place. That said, I won't be leaping to see this one again, especially not with so many better racing movies around.