It’s a miracle that the Fast & Furious franchise has endured this long, but it seems even more shocking that Hobbs & Shaw is its first official spin-off. From the moment The Rock’s Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s reformed Furious 7 villain Deckard Shaw began interacting in The Fate of the Furious, it was clear there was enough chemistry to sustain an entire picture, but the question was always how far outside the series’ confined lines their adventure would color.
In Hobbs & Shaw, those just looking for a throwback buddy movie will be sated by the action on display, but Vin Diesel loyalists will be pleased to discover that even this extracurricular excursion hews closely to the franchise’s themes of familial togetherness and ludicrous speed.
The film’s plot is a straightforward, ‘90s-style fetch quest, with Hobbs and Shaw thrown together to hunt for the film’s McGuffin, Shaw’s baby sister Hattie (fantastic addition Vanessa Kirby), an MI-6 agent on the run with a rare supervirus wanted by Brixton Lore (a scenery-chewing Idris Elba), a literal supervillain working for Etheon, an organization determined to transform the human race into cybernetic ubermensch, even if it means having to slaughter millions of regular homo sapiens.
So, obviously the starting point of the production process was to conjure a justification for Hobbs and Shaw to encounter hijinks without Dominic Toretto’s crew, and longtime F&F screenwriter Chris Morgan’s answer was to toss Shane Black, James Bond, Terminator and The X-Men into a blender and pulse into two-plus-hours-worth of set pieces and banter. At first, the movie is a little too easy, structured like a first draft romantic comedy building up to the titular heroes big meetcute-cum-mission acceptance. Deadpool 2 helmer David Leitch seems to have a blast staging scenes in stereo, splitting the screen to show us each lead’s opposing but complementary lifestyle.
But, the film is front-loaded with overwrought set-up, with the hateful banter between the two leads so persistently cock-measuring as to be borderline uncomfortable. It runs like an old muscle car with something amiss under the hood. Morgan co-wrote the film with Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce, himself a pretty hit-or-miss genre scribe. His involvement and the backstage political pull of the film’s two stars (as well as a pair of overlong cameos from two other big name funnymen) pull the usual F&F baseline a little too far in the wrong direction, aiming for ‘90s action classics but landing in an awkward half-state that’s too blunt to be clever, but too cutesy to be earnest.
As entertaining and thrilling as Leitch’s action work is, the film operating more in the spy-fi space than previous F&F outings means it’s even more obvious how far behind the Mission: Impossible franchise Hobbs & Shaw really is. In trying to function as its own free-standing actioner, the film is serviceable, but slight. It’s not until Morgan’s pet themes and the sincerity of earlier outings in the series comes to the fore that the movie begins to really sing. Both self-professed loners have to wrestle with unprocessed issues with their respective families, and in confronting those issues and the need for companionship, they finally bond and work together to best their more mechanically-minded foes.
That sincerity brings with it a truly absurd third act set in Samoa that takes the final act of Skyfall and blows it up to Bayhem proportions, matching the lovable bombast of the Justin Lin Fast films without retracing his steps. They leave enough on the table to set up a sequel or to tie into future main-cast installments in a way that proves the MCU model isn’t the only way to fuel a multi-pronged media franchise.
The film isn’t perfect and the comedy isn’t calibrated quite as artfully as it could be, but in many ways, Hobbs & Shaw, with its absurd mechanics and questionable tether to real-life physics, provides more palpable comic book thrills than any other superhero movie this year. It’s weird that these movies have evolved this far from Vin Diesel stealing Playstations in a re-skinned Point Break, but you won’t hear this reviewer complaining.
The post Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw appeared first on Spectrum Culture.