Hobbs & Shaw: Not Fast Enough to Enjoy, Not Furious Enough to Hate

I have always kept a healthy distance from the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise. Maybe I was turned off by the way it openly wore its dependence on machismo toxic masculinity culture on its sleeve, maybe it was trailer shots of Vin Diesel struggling to grunt out new-ageism philosophies about family and loyalty that were outdated and generic even by the nineties’ standards, maybe it was because it advertised itself as alternatively the ‘Ocean’s 11’ or ‘James Bond’ for the NASCAR crowd. And when ‘Logan Lucky’ turned out to be the best possible version of both, it removed any relevant reason I ever had to see one of these things. But for some reason, the trailers for the ‘Hobbs and Shaw’ spin-off film had me hooked. The action stunts didn’t look like they were just an excuse to have cars in places, the one-liners, though obviously doctored for the trailer, were funny and fresh, and the Rock was leading a band of Samoan warriors into battle against cyborg mercenaries. So I took the plunge, drank the kool-aid, and went to see the movie. In some ways, it exceeded my meager expectations. And in some ways, it failed on pretty much every conceivable level.

Though I’ve never seen any of the previous installments, the film is more than happy to ease first timers into the narrative. Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) is a single father and government operative working out and executing street justice in LA while Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) is a disgraced former intelligence agent committing similar actions in London. Their respective investigations lead them to clash together when Shaw’s sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), goes rogue on MI6 and steals a deadly pathogen that threatens to wipe out humanity. This is all a front, however, as the real villain is Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), a mysterious figure from Shaw’s past who acts as a the inhuman enforcer for a Transhumanist death cult. In order to save Hattie and, by extension, the human race, Hobbs and Shaw have to overcome their own cartoonish, oversized egos, their shared muddy pasts, and the dry romantic dynamic between Hobbs and Hattie.

Needless to say, the story is nakedly an excuse to jump from action sequence to action sequence in exotic locations, landing in an epic third-act battle in Hobbs’s native Samoa. The dialogue isn’t much better, not leaving a lot of room for the characters to breath or even exist outside of their one-liners, which are once and a while tailored to their individual, meager personalities but are, for the most part, interchangeable.

This mediocrity is reflected in the acting. Though everyone has a surprisingly solid chemistry with one another, most of the actors are operating at fifty percent capacity. By now, Statham has been a slick-talking British badass in so many movies that it’s his default persona, likewise for Johnson though he at least benefits from his outsized screen presence and natural charisma. Elba seems to have found his niche in playing hammy villains in franchise action films and inserts enough pork into his role to test the seams of the movie’s believability.

The only one giving a legitimate performance is Kirby, whose scene-stealing reactions to action beats feel as unforced as her attempts at emoting in the softer scenes are the opposite. This is less her fault, however, as these are moments where the script seems to forget that she’s the only character given a reasonable amount of personality and demotes her to the unfortunate role of “woman.” Cameos from Ryan Reynolds, Helen Mirren, Eiza Gonzalez, Roman Reigns, and Kevin Hart all playing as their respective public personalities help to boost the film’s sense of levity, though a couple of them go on for perhaps a shade longer than they need to.

The stunts, which are easily separated between practical and CGI, range from bland to droll. The best of the set-pieces are given away in the trailers and while the big screen does add somewhat to the spectacle, there’s nothing substantive that’s gained in the translation. Shoot outs quickly lose their suspense when it becomes clear that none of the main characters could get shot if they tried and any manufactured tension drops off the radar after one too many unbelievable car tricks. The insertion of banging hip hop tracks over the fight scenes does add to the brief adrenaline rush and the specific picks are tongue and cheek enough that they add to the atmosphere instead of taking away from it. However, in a day and age where the ‘John Wick’ movies have established the gold standard of shooting action scenes as clear, concise, and exposed as possible, there is no excuse for generic, shaky-cam fights where action is downright unintelligible due to the lack of coherence between cuts. It’s a sin the film indulges in liberally and could not be worse off for it. These all might be staples of the franchise, as appears to be the case, but that doesn’t excuse bad filmmaking.

And yet, for better or for worse, I can’t bring myself to hate ‘Hobbs and Shaw.’ It’s like an overactive child in that it only tries hard at the things it already knows its good at and doesn’t try at all in areas where it shows even a hint of struggle. I had low expectations for this film, but hoped that I would be pleasantly surprised with an enjoyable, popcorn-munching B-movie. Instead, I got franchise management with a little bit of flair. And while it wasn’t the disaster of cinema it had the potential to be, and truth be told what I feared it might have been, I don’t think I can really recommend this one to anyone outside of the hardcore fans of the series. Sorry Rocky.

1/5.

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