Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
Two ampersands is too many—or maybe one feels the obligation of these films too heavily anymore. During the climactic confrontation of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), while climbing onto the back of an epic tow truck driven by begrudging buddy Decker Shaw (Jason Statham), pauses to put his shirt back on. It makes no difference whether he wears a shirt or not; his typical choice for clothing is “sprayed on,” as Decker puts it. The Rock, and therefore Hobbs, cannot hide their immensity, and so they (he) embrace(s) it, as suitably inhuman as the F&F universe demands he be. So why the shirt, when it’s about as functional as a fig leaf and twice as thin? Why isn’t he wearing the “state-of-the-art” bulletproof jacket he copped from conveniently, inhumanly attractive Madame M (Eiza Gonzalez)? Considering director David Leitch’s previous two films—Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2—the weird, blink-or-you-miss-it gesture of the Rock putting his shirt back on when the situation hardly calls for it could be read as a meta-commentary on action movie ubermensch tropes requiring that insanely jacked dudes be as shirtless as possible, instead choosing to keep our heroes chaste and sexless. That’s probably not the case, not only because the Rock’s spent the past 15 minutes shirtless, but because, whether he’s wearing a shirt or not, the Rock is always shirtless.
As is the case with Atomic Blonde, Leitch seems committed again to developing an homage to a certain era of genre filmmaking, then desensitizing the audience to whatever well-crafted style it’s mimicking. With Hobbs & Shaw, our duo follows in the footsteps of Riggs & Murtaugh, Cates & Hammond, Tango & Cash, Turner & Hooch—taking ’80s buddy cop action movies and focus-grouping them down to the nub. Bland backpack rap blares over one montage after another while comic book panels and subtitles slide past the screen as unpleasantly as Mel Gibson’s mullet. A woman’s butt is discriminately filmed by regular Leitch cinematographer Jonathan Sela, luxuriating in its closeness. We’re not that woke, folks! After all, the Fast & Furious movies are about two things: family, and butts.
“Family” of course gets the drinking game mention, as our plot centers around Shaw’s sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), an MI6 agent framed for the murder of her team and for absconding with a super-virus she was originally sent to procure and protect. Instead, ambushed by actual ubermensch Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), Hattie injects the virus into her hand, then just barely escapes Lore’s grasp. Turns out, Lore has various cyber-genetic enhancements granted him by shadowy tech megacorporation Etheon, literally reborn from a previous life in which he worked with Shaw, who—yaddah yaddah yaddah—apparently “had” to shoot him in the head. With a gun. On the run, Hattie crosses paths with her estranged brother and potential love interest Hobbs, the two of them partnered up by the CIA and MI6, orchestrated into a meet-cute by cameo agents Lock (Ryan Reynolds) and Loeb (Rob Delaney), two Leitch pitch-hitters who are, respectively, very not funny and only very funny because he’s able to maintain a strange atonal distance from all the blockbuster gobbledygook expositionally washing up all around him. Hobbs and Shaw, who found some common ground in The Fate of the Furious, of course can’t stand each other at first, but inevitably grow to be “brothers,” despite Shaw killing Han (Sung Kang) (and a lot of other people) in previous Fast & Furious entries. Screenwriter Chris Morgan makes it clear that future Hobbs & Shaw shoot-em-ups will further address the “amends” Shaw needs to make for his homicidal past—but in the meantime: Family! Hobbs and Shaw must put aside their differences to find a way to extract the virus from Hattie and defeat the maniacal Lore, an adventure which draws the Shaw siblings closer and brings Hobbs back to his native Samoa to reunite with a mother (Lori Pelenise Tuisano) and brothers he long ago left behind.
As the F&F universe further spins out and off into wider radii, Hobbs & Shaw is the first sign that a Fast & Furious movie isn’t as well-defined as we may have hoped. Even the film’s many lavish set pieces—a chase down the side of a skyscraper that morphs into a car vs. motorcycle spree through the streets of London; a battle royale in the Etheon facility; the aforementioned all-out brawl in the Hobbs family’s land that culminates in a helicopter sparring with a human centipede of tow trucks, each vehicle crapping nitrous gas into the grill of the tow truck behind it—fade into an over-CGI’d melange of exceptional people doing exceptional things, reducing all stakes to a motivation for Shaw to make fun of how Hobbs is a graceless behemoth, or for Hobbs to make fun of how Shaw is a tiny weak old man with stubby stupid legs. Leitch, who’s proven himself a precise action filmmaker with his work on John Wick and with a few bravura scenes in Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2, can’t quite anchor his kinetic choreography here, never losing any sense of geography so much as admitting his geography doesn’t matter, guys just sort of flailing everywhere in the melee of Hobbs and Shaw’s prowess while the camera always feels just shy of being in the right place at the right time. More and more, Leitch embraces the idea of a sweet action scene over the visceral execution of it.