Fast & Furious: Hobbs and Shaw – Film Review

Pictured: Shaw, MI6 and Hobbs take in some high culture in the otherwise low brow 'Fast & Furious [Presents]: Hobbs and Shaw. A Universal Release

I am a sucker for a good trailer and boy did I fall hard for ‘Fast & Furious: Hobbs and Shaw’, a spin-off – well, something’s off – of the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise.

A quick re-cap: the ‘Fast and Furious’ flicks are about family as well as street car racing, larceny, guys with bald heads and increasingly bold stunt sequences usually involving moving vehicles. Oh, and let’s not forget the celebrity cameos of people like Kurt Russell and Helen Mirren who know better and – wait a minute, that’s a stonking wodge of moolah, what do you want me to do?

Like the cars that featured in the early movies, the later episodes got customised with big stars signing up to have a viable pension plan. At a certain point, Dwayne Johnson joined to play Luke Hobbs, the intelligence agent out to bust Vin Diesel’s ‘I say my lines a quarter of a minute at a time’ villain-turned-anti-hero, Dominic Toretto. Then Jason Statham popped up in one of those post credits ‘I wasn’t in the film you just watched, but just you wait for the next one’ teaser bits as Deckard ‘I’ve got two last names’ Shaw. Nevertheless, as expensive and auto-destructive as they are, the ‘Fast and Furious’ films are all posture and no delivery, like a Fed-Ex office at Thanksgiving.

The franchise gained unexpected emotional depth by the passing of their star, Paul Walker, died aged 40, in November 2013, during the production of ‘Furious 7’ in which Deckard Shaw made his first appearance. Its box-office demanded more sequels. Incidentally for that movie, Vin Diesel and Jason Statham apparently demanded an equal number of punches in the fight sequences. The series is like movie absolution: sooner or later a bad guy will do something good.

The unsung auteur behind the series is not Rob Cohen, who directed the first one, but screenwriter Chris Morgan, who signed onto the franchise in 2006 with ‘Tokyo Drift’, the third in the series and has worked on the screenplay for every ‘F&F’ movie since. He knows the formula flat. Start the movie in one exotic location. Continue the action in another. End it somewhere unexpected. How do you get from location ‘B’ to location ‘C’? In ‘Hobbs and Shaw’ it is courtesy of a celebrity air marshal.  

‘Hobbs and Shaw’ has the simplest story line imaginable. An MI6 agent (Vanessa Kirby) injects herself with a super-virus that could wipe out half the planet (aka just like Thanos from ‘Avengers: Infinity War’). Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw are the only ones who can track her down and extract it with the aid of a bespectacled scientist (Eddie Marsan) within 44 hours. The action moves from London to Russia/Ukraine to a finale in Samoa. Why Samoa? Dwayne Johnson, one of the producers, is from there.

The villain is self-styled ‘Black Superman’ Brixton (Idris Elba), who is just like the ‘Universal Soldier’ from the Roland Emmerich franchise only from Thornton Heath. Elba is stitched up – literally, you should see the back of him – as a super soldier who can anticipate every move but still ends up standing alone at the end of every set piece giving the camera a moody stare.

‘Hobbs and Shaw’ may remind you of ‘Tango and Cash’ in which Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell cancelled each other out. Like that film, it appears that the makers thought of the poster first and then thought, ‘what about the script?’ There is a serious lack of bro-mance going on, even when celebrity cameos come to break up the party. In one scene, Hobbs is stopped at the airport for having a silly name. The movie stops because it is not silly enough.

The real disappointment is that the film is never as big as it wants to be. Yes, Brixton proves surprisingly able to re-mount his motorbike, but the stunt loses something with repetition. Where are the destroyed monuments or absurd auto stunts? At one point, Hobbs appears to weigh more than a helicopter as he holds it by a chain. You’re pulling my chain, more like.

Not only is it not bro-mantic, it is also unsexy. At one point, Shaw is kissed by a Russian businesswoman (Eiza Gonzalez) and there is a disappointing lack of ‘show us the insides of your mouth and the pistons firing’ that we get when motor cars with souped-up engines rev up. When the MI6 agent kisses Hobbs, it’s like ‘look, no saliva’.

There is a serious lack of tension in the action sequences. They aren’t even entertainingly silly, except when Hobbs free-falls onto a series of bad guys. It’s in the trailer, so I wasn’t wowed. What I really wanted – and what the trailer had – was the film to step outside of itself, to concentrate on some quirky detail, before re-immersing us in the action.

As in ‘The Fate of the Furious’, Helen Mirren turns up as Deckard’s mum, and she’s a right tea-leaf, gawd blimey put me in ‘Eastenders’. The worst thing about it is the spoiler about ‘Game of Thrones’. Why ‘Game of Thrones’? It is a reminder of the film’s demographic. In its own way, ‘Hobbs and Shaw’ is as disappointing and anti-climactic as the final season of ‘GoT’.  It has no right to be smug. The anonymous direction is by David Leitch. Drew Pearce collaborated with Morgan on the paint by numbers script. It would not surprise me if that talking computer that gives Brixton his orders wasn’t Morgan himself as a scriptwriting algorithm.

‘Fast & Furious [Presents]: Hobbs and Shaw’ opened globally on Thursday 1^st August 2019, rated two stars.