“F1: The Movie” and “M3GAN 2.0” are going head-to-head this weekend — not on the racetrack but at the box office — and Brad Pitt’s Formula 1 flick appears to be the one winning over critics.
Joseph Kosinski’s first blockbuster since the billion-dollar grossing “Top Gun: Maverick” sees the Oscar winner, 61, suiting up as a retired F1 driver who jumps back behind the wheel to mentor a younger driver played by Damson Idris.
As of Thursday afternoon, “F1” boasted an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a generally favorable rating of 71 on Metacritic. Meanwhile, “M3GAN 2.0” held significantly lower scores on both review aggregator sites, with a 63% on Rotten Tomatoes and widely mixed reviews leading to a 55 on Metacritic.
RogerEbert.com afforded “F1” 2.5 out of 4 stars, given it has “little to say about the sport’s past, present or future,” but noted the film’s heart-pounding race scenes and “propulsive ride” are not a “wasted diversion.”
The Washington Post and San Jose Mercury News agreed the film was treading — as the Irish Times put it — “thuddingly familiar” territory.
The Houston Chronicle similarly dubbed the film “predictable” and “sometimes dramatically inert,” but praised “F1” offering audiences a “refuge of air-conditioned escapism” amid a “long, hot summer full of unnerving news in the wider world.”
A sequel to Gerard Johnstone’s 2022 sci-fi horror flick “M3GAN” — in which the titular AI robot (voiced by Jenna Davis) goes violently rogue to “protect” her young charge, Cady (Violet McGraw) — “M3GAN 2.0” leans far more heavily into the camp that made its predecessor a surprise hit at the box office and online.
Johnstone’s sequel picks up two years later, at which point M3gan has been upgraded by her creator (Allison Williams reprising her role as Gemma) and unleashed to overtake a defense contractor’s military-grade bot made from the same underlying tech.
“Imagine John Waters at the helm of a ‘Terminator 2’ remake and you have an inkling of just how wild a pivot ‘M3GAN 2.0’ is from its predecessor,” said Slant, adding that while the film is a crowd-pleaser, it struggles to balance “being a broad action-horror-comedy-satire at the same time.”
Empire Magazine, while still giving the film 4 out of 5 stars, made sure to note that pure horror fans will likely object to what is ultimately a comedy.
Mashable, meanwhile, dubbed the flick a “horrendous mishmash of ideas and influence” that proves largely “derivative, bewildering and bland.”
The “more morally driven” follow-up film fails to “engender that same delighted shock” as the original, according to the AV Club, which afforded the film a weak C+ as it “limps, with exaggerated metal squeaks, into the future.”
“F1” and “M3GAN 2.0” open in theaters nationwide on Friday.
