FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW (M)
A SPIN-OFF NOT JUST SPINNING ITS WHEELS DIRECTOR: DAVID LEITCH (DEADPOOL 2) STARRING: DWAYNE JOHNSON, JASON STATHAM, IDRIS ELBA, VANESSA KIRBY, HELEN MIRREN
RATING : ★★★
Pssst! Are you having trouble sleeping knowing there is still the best part of 11 months to go until the release of Fast & Furious 9?
Well, toss and turn no more, because the pre-eminent petrol-head franchise has opened the doors to the garage and unleashed its first-ever spin-off.
Feel free to thumb a lift. It’s a pretty wild and wired ride for the most part, even if the journey runs about a half-hour too long. If you know your way around the Fast &
Furious universe, you’ll know a movie called Hobbs and Shaw means the popular supporting characters played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham are now the stars of their own show.
The Rock plays rule-abiding US Federal Agent Luke Hobbs and Statham plays rulebreaking British mercenary Decker Shaw, and from what we’ve seen in Fast & Furious
7 and 8, these sworn frenemies don’t exactly get along like a house on fire.
Some F&F devotees with long memories will also be justifiably unhappy to be seeing Shaw again, as it is hard to overlook his murder of franchise fan favourite Han a few movies ago.
Now the bickering duo are gonna have to buddy up fast if they’re going to stop a killer body-melting virus from falling into the wrong hands. And those wrong hands belong to one hell of a bad hombre, an indestructible man-mountain named Brixton Lore, played by Idris Elba.
Also mixed up in this race to stop most of the world’s population being wiped out is Shaw’s rogue-spy sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), and their hard-nosed mum, Magdalene (Helen Mirren).
Now then, it has to be emphasised that nobody comes to a movie like Hobbs and
Shaw for the plot. They come along for a bit of biff, a bit of banter and a big fat whack of over-the-top car chases and shootouts.
For the first two-thirds of Hobbs and Shaw, the movie gets the balance exactly right between adrenaline and amusement. Johnson and Statham have a good basic comedy chemistry, and the stunt sequences are ridiculously audacious.
It is only in the final section of Hobbs and
Shaw that the movie begins to lose some of his hard-earned momentum.
The action switches to Dwayne Johnson’s island nation home of Samoa for its finale, where things start getting really, really stoo-pid … and stay that way.
Nevertheless, Hobbs and Shaw gets the job done as a big-screen thrill machine — you won’t remember much of it in a week’s time, but you won’t walk away thinking you’ve done your dough on a dud.