In a mid-film sequence in “Hobbs and Shaw,” the new “Fast & Furious” spinoff, one of the heroes tries to talk the villain out of his plan to destroy the world. Surely, this formerly upstanding man would not commit genocide. His response? “Genocide, Schmemocide.” If that sounds incredibly inane it’s because it is. So is the film.
I imagine that the pitch for “Hobbs and Shaw” consisted of this single idea–let’s watch Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Jason Statham bicker for two hours. And, sure, why not? If you’ve seen enough movies then you’re familiar with the scenario: two stars of the same sex, and similar popularity, headline a film. The tenor of their relationship varies–sometimes they’re friendly partners or bitter-rivals–but the film’s attraction tends to come from their rapport, that is, seeing too similar (or dissimilar) folks interact with each other. But for this set up to work, the rapport has to be grounded and “Hobbs and Shaw” is built on the flimsiest of conceits, a film who’s every plot point seems lifted from another film and who’s entire ethos might best be summed up in the shrug emoji.
Hobbs (played by Johnson), an Ameri-can federal agent, and Shaw (played by Statham), a British mercenary, are brought in to save the world (literally) when a virus that can wipe out millions of people is believed to have been stolen and in danger of being captured by a terrorist organisation. Why was it created in the first place? For a plot contrivance, naturally. It’s a familiar one. The terrorist group wants to save humanity from themselves. There’s a female agent involved to create romantic tensions. There are requisite car-chases, fist-fights, arguments and dei ex machina to keep the audience entranced. The usual. It’s all very familiar, and very dismal.
To be fair, “Hobbs and Shaw” isn’t deficient because it’s derivative. But it is deficient. And it is derivative. And it is instructive to consider how a story that technically began 18 years ago in 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious,” about an undercover LAPD officer trying to find the identities of a group of car-hijackers, has wrought this film, where a former British Special Forces assassin and an American federal agent must team up to save the world from a eugenicist MI6 agent who has gone rogue. Even the unwieldiness of its full title – “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw” mirrors its stylistic and narrative cumbersomeness. And, there’s the rub. There’s no reason beyond tangential name-recognition for this film to be part of that franchise. Statham and The Rock have built careers out of playing stock tough guys, so making this a self-contained film would have done nothing except knock off the few million this may earn just from those who flock to the film for the mere promise of something related to the series. And it’s that sort of craven laziness that sums up this film, which is working mostly on the fumes of a plane that was wrecked while running on autopilot.
And sure, the counterargument is that no one goes to these kinds of movies for logical storytelling but what annoys me about that lazy ceding of responsibility is that there’s no reason that high-octane thrilling entertainment needs to be deliberately inept. (See the Mission Impossible series). And what’s worse is that nothing here feels honest or sincere, except perhaps Helen Mirren, in a brief cameo, chewing scenery to hilarious results.
On Thursday of this week, the Wall Street Journal released an essay explaining the elaborate on-set rules of the franchise where the male stars jostle for alpha-supremacy ensuring that they don’t get knocked down or appear to be losing too often in fights. This extends beyond the fight scenes. Neither The Rock nor Statham is ever willing to cede anything to the other in this masquerade of masculinity that becomes exhausting by the fifth joke about the other’s virility. The pair’s bickering isn’t well written enough to be banter, and both are too effortful in their projections of machismo to appear as charming, so instead it all feels like an onslaught – to the eyes, to the ears and to the soul. The film itself is so poorly plotted that the consistent build-up to the climax feels absent, with momentum being lost for scene-upon-scene of masturbatory one-upmanship.
Even worse, the film doesn’t look very good. To be fair to director David Leitch, who has done so much better work elsewhere, the film isn’t visually repellent in any way but it is shockingly generic looking for such a big budget film. The excessive dependence on digitisation for its action sequences create a sense of weightlessness in the film’s stakes before long. And with a US$200 million price tag, the computer-generated sameness of Hobbes and Shaw moves from unexceptional to dismaying very quickly. The fact that it spends its entire running-time riffing on franchises that are much less expensive makes one wonder where all that money went.
The final battle sequence on a Samoan island, over a course of 30 minutes within the film and about half that in real time, is a cluttered, visual mess. Discernment is impossible and so are emotional beats when the audience cannot tell where characters are in relation to each other. It reveals the film’s consistent issue – providing context, whether narratively or, as in this case, visually. The film’s choppy editing becomes a liability as cross-cutting seems to be mistaken for good editing because for all the frenetic shots between locales, you never really know what is happening or more importantly where it’s happening. That this final battle faces a wealth of continuity issues as the 30-minute countdown moves from a dark night to bright daylight to torrential rain within the timeframe only reveals what we already know. No one creating this thing really cares that deeply about what’s happening. So why should we?
“Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw” is currently playing at local theatres