With “F1,” producer Jerry Bruckheimer poured $200 million into essentially remaking his own 1990 film “Days of Thunder,” and what’s hilarious is that the end result is actually worth watching in theaters.

Huge credit for this feat has to go to director Joseph Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who also helped deliver “Top Gun: Maverick” for Bruckheimer in 2022, and clearly understand the assignment of manufacturing a Jerry Bruckheimer-style high-octane crowd-pleaser.

“F1,” short for “Formula 1,” is aptly titled, because it is entirely formulaic and moves very fast, but what makes this endless succession of racing film clichés work is how effectively they’re executed.

Brad Pitt continues his streak of Promethean heroes as Sonny Hayes, a former prodigy gone to seed in the racing circuit, who’s offered a final shot as a Formula 1 driver by Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), a former teammate from the 1990s who now runs his own racing team.

“F1” is the type of cruise-control action film in which every single potential interpersonal conflict is explicitly spelled out, for the audience’s convenience, by the characters’ own expository dialogue.

The team’s losing streak under Ruben has given its investors itchy trigger-fingers, and Ruben recruiting Sonny, who’s less a has-been than a never-was, only makes them more anxious.

Worse yet, Sonny’s recruitment is seen as a threat by the team’s pre-existing driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), an up-and-comer who’s looking after his mother Bernadette (Sarah Niles) while trying to maintain an advantageous social media profile.

The rivalry between Sonny and Joshua, who share too much of a hotheaded need for dominance to get along, is as textbook to this type of movie as Sonny’s cocky courtship of the smart and headstrong design engineer of the team’s car, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon).

As with Tom Cruise’s “Maverick,” Pitt’s performance as Sonny requires a finely tuned balance of aggressive arrogance with flashes of reckless disregard for good sense, mixed with underlying insights on how best to benefit the same teammates to whom he’s been inconsiderate.

A nicely humanizing touch comes when a young pit mechanic, who happens to be one of the few women on the team, apologizes to Sonny for a mistake made under pressure, and he insists that she not beat herself up over it, since plenty of others will anyway.

Sonny and Kate’s relationship is also well-scripted, making them professional peers who come to respect each other’s knowledge and experience, which enables substantive conversations about how to win races, which in turn reveals who the characters are as people.

It’s at least more organic than Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s onscreen romance in “Days of Thunder,” enough that I was mostly able to overlook the 19-year real life age gap between Pitt and Condon.

Idris and Niles’ mother-son pairing is endearingly understated and authentic as well, since it gives them both emotional stakes in the races’ outcomes, even beyond their moments of peril.

But if you’re in the market for a film like “F1,” you may not care much about any of this, so I’ll get to the good stuff.

Unsurprisingly for a director who gave us both the aircraft combat sequences in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and the Light Cycle chases in 2010’s deeply underrated “Tron: Legacy,” Kosinski and his cinematographer from those films, Claudio Miranda, literally put viewers in the driver’s seat for “F1.”

Not only does the story itself address how advances in technology have revolutionized the engineering of race cars and the training of drivers, but progressively compact cameras have afforded the immediacy of close-in action shots that simply wouldn’t have been possible not that long ago.

Even while watching especially intense scenes, I’m usually pretty good about remembering that what I’m seeing are moving pictures, framed by a screen, but there are some moments in “F1,” notably when the drivers struggle to stay on the track, as they’re rounding its turns, when the visuals almost feel like haptics, like a vibrating video game controller.

“F1” won’t win any storytelling awards, nor should it, but it’s enough fun at the races that its two-and-a-half-hour running time practically flies by, even if you stick around for its breezily amusing but non-essential postscript scene, in the midst of its ending credits.