BLAlley

Paying Brad Pitt $30 million to sit in a simulator and putter around a track for promo shots seems even more wasteful than usual. Saying the actors drove the cars at 200 mph is like saying the actors flew the planes in Top Gun: Maverick. The sped up footage aside, it's obvious any actor footage other than getting in and pulling away was shot on a virtual stage or with a tow rig since the camera would have blocked the actors' vision for the closeups.

The rest of the movie only makes it worse with it's drawn out melodrama and unrealistic relationships and depiction of racing rules and etiquette.

The only thing it gets right is the fact F1 is the latest sport to become a trendy hobby for Wall Street douchebags who have used internet influencers to boost its popularity so they can make even more money.

This show is unwatchable due to the terrible camera work alone. Apparently the director and camera operator mistook this overacted 'historical' drama for a rap video. It constantly switches to distorted lenses or shoves the camera into the actors' faces or onto whatever they think we're too stupid to have seen with normal framing.

In addition to the bad camera work, the show features actors constantly yelling, accompanied by someone kicking the side of a dumpster so we understand it's an important and dramatic moment.

Wait a minute. Perhaps it's not that we're missing important details or moments, maybe the people who made this simply have no idea how to tell a $#^&% story without gimmicks.

This had echoes of Die Hard 2, if Die Hard 2 wasn't an implausible mess due to the hyper-convoluted plot and absurdly huge crew of bad guys.

Instead, Carry On is lean and efficient, until a monkey wrench is thrown into the antagonists' plan, resulting in some good twists along the way.

From the moment the antagonists appear the tension builds in an engaging cat-and-mouse game between them and the unwitting protagonist. Once the jig is up it breaks into action and doesn't relent. Like John McClane from the aforementioned Die Hard series, the hero is not perfect and caught off guard, but ultimately steps up in spite of making mistakes. The resolution was set up well to avoid the all-to-common reliance on eye-roll inducing magic knowledge or abilities that shouldn't exist. Even then we are treated to an unexpected turn with its own underlying sense of risk.