Hobbs & Shaw – Review

Hobbs & Shaw

Directed by: David Leitch

Runtime: 136 minutes

I was twelve years old when The Fast and The Furious (2001) came to the local twin theatre in my small country town. As I recall rather vividly, it was one of the social events of the year. The theatre over-sold tickets to the point where people had to sit on the stairs in the isles and down on the floor at the front, craning their necks upwards into Paul Walker’s (RIP) dazzling baby blues. Although it was arguably just a remake of Point Break (1991) for the turn-of-the-millennium X Games set (and a much more serviceable remake than the god awful one that followed fourteen years later), it was the type of film that cut right across age, background and high-school cliques. Above all else, the film was the epitome of cool. After leaving the theatre with my friends, I remember older dudes attempting to drag their shitty Commodores and Falcons down the main road, talking non-ironically about doing ‘quarter-miles’ and the rumours of people acquiring NOS would float around town for years.

Had you told me then, that nearly two decades later, Fast and Furious would go on to become a billion-dollar global film franchise sporting no less than eight additional films, I would have laughed in your face, done a quick spin in my super-cool skate shoes, and returned to downloading bootleg MP3’s off Napster through my 56k dial-up modem. Now, nostalgic reverie aside, the point I’m trying to make here is that times have well and truly changed. Around the franchise’s fifth film, Fast Five (2011), the studio-heads at Universal decided the entire concept needed a much-needed service, before popping the hood and switching out engines.

The emphasis on street racing was gone, replaced by high-stakes heists, gun fights and lavish car-centric set-pieces. Think the wise-cracking group dynamics of Ocean’s Eleven (2001) meets the wild intensity of Bad Boys II (2003) and you’re on the right track. It’s here that we’re introduced to Dwyane ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s Luke Hobbs: a literal man-mountain government enforcer sent to retrieve Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and crew, and he’s easily the best addition to the franchise in this current decade. By the time Furious 7 (2015) drifted into theatres, Dom and his crew upgraded from running drugs for the cartels, to pulling international heists and squaring off against Statham’s formidable Deckard Shaw—not to mention fighting the forces of international terrorism with a seemingly limitless government budget.

As the first direct spin-off from the core narrative of the film franchise, Hobbs & Shaw picks up after the events of the eighth film, The Fate of the Furious (2017), where Shaw begrudgingly changed sides from bad to good, in order to help Hobbs, Dom and the crew settle a score with film’s villain. This time around, Hobbs and Shaw are recruited by separate government agencies, forced to work together and team-up against an evil, shadow corporation trying to wipe out humankind with a deadly virus along with defeating Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), a former MI6 agent turned cybernetically enhanced super-solider. Directed by David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, John Wick) and co-written by Chris Morgan (credited for each film in the franchise since 2006’s Tokyo Drift), Hobbs and Shaw certainly feels like it has all the elements of a Fast and Furious film: quippy, one-liner laden dialogue, expensive cars, flashy soundtrack, and plenty of big battles with bullets, cars, fists and explosions. But perhaps most importantly, there’s still an emphasis on family (“salute la familia” indeed). In fact, the focus on family essentially drives the narrative of Hobbs and Shaw, culminating in a very silly third act which serves to develop and grow our titular characters. A lot of this is signposted at the outset of the film, with the placement of some key yet very unsubtle MacGuffin’s and ham-fisted character exchanges, so if you’re paying attention, you’ll likely clock where the film ends up within the first twenty minutes.

Leitch’s direction fits rather seamlessly against the other franchise films, eschewing some of his more subversive visual style for the sweeping exteriors, whirling transitions and fight choreography of traditional blockbuster film language. Johnson and Statham bring a certain amount of chemistry together as a pair of unlikely allies; however, it does become obvious in moments of isolation that their whole ‘buddy-cop schtick’ is a little tired and formulaic. There are jokes about dumbbells, there are jokes about British accents and Harry Potter, and we’ve heard them all before. The duo really shines when the script allows their energy to playfully bounce off others, like Vanessa Kirby’s excellent Hattie, or in some extremely well-placed celebrity cameos (no spoilers here, but they definitely garnered the biggest laughs in the entire film). Hobbs and Shaw also comfortably takes first place for being the most ‘meta’ Fast & Furious film, calling attention to the sheer ridiculousness of the film’s premise (and the larger franchise itself) with casual character asides, on top of cheeky ‘wow, how topical’ references to everything from Games of Thrones to Star Wars and The Italian Job.

That being said, where the film struggles is in its villains. Watch a comic-book film adaptation from the last twenty years, or any run-of-the-mill blockbuster really, and you’ll see that the central problem is making the motivations of your antagonist/s feel serious and real. And while the stakes are made very clear in Hobbs and Shaw—almost painfully so—the film never really manages to shift gears in this respect. By the film’s conclusion, we know as little about the evil, shadow corporation trying to wipe out humanity as when we started, and if I know anything about Hollywood in 2019, that just means they’re priming audiences for more spin-offs and a cavalcade of sequels. With Elba as Brixton, there’s no doubt that he’s a terrific actor with incredible dramatic range, but he’s simply not given a lot to work with here. He spends most of the film spouting cliché cartoon villain lines about “the evolution of man” and how people can’t be trusted to save themselves, without really selling us on why he believes it. At one point, mid-torture rant, he brushes off appeals to his conscience by saying, and I quote here: “Genocide, schmenocide”—a line that, in my screening anyway, got nowhere near the number of laughs that something that deliciously stupid should get.

As evidenced by the stakes here, racing Skylines for pink slips at Race Wars this is not. If the spy thrills of the equally entertaining and successful Mission Impossible franchise could be thought of as the cinematic equivalent of a double espresso shot, then Hobbs and Shaw and the entire Fast & Furious franchise writ large is essentially a meathead crushing a tall-boy can of Rockstar Energy drink. There’s no identity crisis here: the film unashamedly knows how big, loud and kind of dumb it is, and to be honest, there’s a refreshing sense of honesty in that. As I helpfully explained to someone at my premiere screening, who hadn’t followed the franchise since the asinine 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003): “The Rock and The Transporter good. Idris Elba bad. Cars still sick.” And that’s all you really need to know.

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