Released under the dignified tagline of “sports drama,” Apple’s F1 is, at best, a camp classic in the making. Only Mystery Science Theater 3000 could do sardonic justice to this torrent of macho movie clichés patched together by an old hack producer, Jerry Bruckheimer (Top Gun) — who never lost money underestimating the intelligence of the general public — and younger hack director Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick).

The result is a silly male-bonding spectacle on a lavish scale. Of course, there’s a certain fascination in watching rivers of money go by, and everything in F1 looks absurdly expensive and inflated. You could house villages in the enormous hotel rooms in various exotic settings where the members of a failing Formula One racing team are staying. Brad Pitt, playing Sonny Hayes, the maverick itinerant driver for hire brought in to salvage that team, has had so much work done on his face, that alone must’ve been a startling line item in the movie’s budget, which is rumored to be as high as $300 million.

It’s Apple’s biggest film yet — they’ve now officially got a hit on their hands with a $140 million opening weekend. A ludicrous hit, but when have Hollywood types ever minded that? Plus, it’s such an advantage to make a movie that functions as a very long commercial for Apple’s AirPods Max, which are glued to Pitt’s ears for much of the film’s running time.

Though there are definitely moments when you wonder how genuinely talented actors can bear to do this kind of crap. Poor Javier Bardem, he really had to earn his huge payday! He plays Ruben Cervantes, once a racecar driver, now the sharply dressed owner of a failing team who brings in his old friend Sonny for one last shot at success. He greets Sonny by pulling him into a bear hug, exclaiming with gruff John Wayne–ish affection, “You sunnuva bitch!”

Is it my imagination that Bardem seemed stiff and uncomfortable throughout this performance of trite by-the-numbers character beats? He spends most of the movie on the sidelines of enormous racetracks, pretending to watch races, looking either anxious about losing or thrilled about winning. You can imagine he and Kosinski probably worked out a simple number system, with the director asking for either “Look #1” or “Look #2.”

Whereas Tobias Menzies seems perfectly happy creeping around as the villainous rich guy, pale and eel-like, ready to sell out the team at a moment’s notice. But then, you know how it is with English actors. They can’t really be shamed. They’re so used to working relentlessly at every kind of acting job — Hamlet on stage one month, Midsomer Murders on ITV the next — that a dopey American action film like F1 is just another day at the office. An exceptionally well-paid day.

Kerry Condon, who was so splendid in The Banshees of Inisherin, has the worst role, that of The Girlfriend. Writer Ehren Kruger (Top Gun: Maverick) tries to finesse this demeaning part by giving her a real job — she’s playing Kate McKenna, the technical director who’s trying to refine the performance of the team’s cars — but it fools nobody. She’s there to do the familiar duty of providing the male star with a love interest, She Who Will Be Bedded to prove that this is a 100-percent heterosexual extravaganza of men hugging and sharing tough love. She also spends much of her time delivering Look #1 and Look #2, though it’s worth noting that Condon has such a dear personality, she gets by with it somehow.

Newcomer Damson Idris plays Joshua Pearce, the hot young rookie talent who still has a thing or two to learn from the old pro played by the Big Star, a storyline that’s been enacted a trillion times since the invention of the narrative film at the dawn of the twentieth century. What can Idris do but go through his paces relying on youthful good looks and charm? Nothing. So that’s what he does.

Pitt is an old hand at this conventional heroic stuff and seems unabashed by grinning with wry confidence, squinting handsomely in flattering light, and playing scenes in which he refuses to go by the book as all the character actors around him register amazement at his high T-levels. Pitt has to walk repeatedly into extreme long shots as a crowd stands in the foreground watching his legendary gunslinger approach in silent awe, like a bunch of gullible townspeople in a traditional Western. He does it with the aplomb of one who’s been a star since Thelma & Louise rocketed him to fame back in 1991.

In F1, there’s a lot of that kind of poaching from the Western genre. Sonny Hayes, for example, gets through an entire press conference answering urgent sports reporter questions with nothing but Gary Cooper’s famously laconic replies from his now-ancient Western hero roles: “Yup” and “Nope.”

I may have been the only person in the audience getting the reference, but my scorn was big enough to fill the theater on behalf of everyone.

Because the thing is, it’s possible to do genre films really well, especially when you’ve got all the money in the world and can afford a lot of great talent. There are stylish ways of embracing formulaic artifice and making it fresh again. Conventions can always be reworked to make them meaningful for a new generation. But clearly nobody involved with F1 is too worried about that. They know its big dumb posturing will sell.

Perhaps most unforgivably, F1 is two hours and thirty-six minutes long. Which is terrific for car racing enthusiasts, I guess. They must be ecstatic every time the two main characters suit up and pull on their helmets and climb into their race cars yet again and go vroom vroom in a circle at considerable length.

The governing body of Formula One racing, the FIA, collaborated with the filmmakers during production, and many drivers and other F1 personnel appear in the movie and presumably add to the authenticity of the race scenes. Old race car films like Le Mans (1971) with Steve McQueen, Winning (1969) with Paul Newman, and Grand Prix (1968) with James Garner, Yves Montand, and Toshiro Mifune used to pull in a lot of real-life top drivers and resources from the world of racing too, with spectacular, fast-cut footage as the biggest audience draw other than the movie stars. F1 is no different, with plenty of tension built into the kinetic shooting and editing of the races, and the inevitability of the lurid car crashes built into the narrative.

Which is probably all that’s needed to make the film a summertime smash, some sense of it being “the best racing film ever made,” a pathetically low bar to set but one that excites people anyway. If you can feel yourself getting dumber just by watching F1, that’s part of the appeal too — helping you achieve the full, sweaty stupor of the season.