Fuelled up for a
EVERY Fast & Furious film ends with a spectacular scene of vehicular nonsense. In this ninth instalment, director David Leitch attaches a daisy-chain of speeding vintage trucks to a helicopter. It’s not quite up there withVin Diesel jumping three Dubai skyscrapers in a Lebanese supercar but a box is definitely ticked.
Hobbs & Shaw isn’t just the franchise’s first spin-off, it’s also its first buddy movie. Here, the crime-fighting “family” of petrolheads have been reduced to a bickering party of two – Dwayne Johnson’s hulking lawman Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s British former black ops baddie Deckard Shaw.
While this film makes firm financial sense – both men are huge stars in China – their comedy partnership never gets off the ground. Hobbs and Shaw
have been rubbing each other up the wrong way since 2013’s Fast & Furious 6. But here they are forced to work together after Idris Elba’s genetically-enhanced supervillain Brixton reveals a plan to speed up human evolution by causing a global pandemic that will wipe out the weak.
He has developed an airborne virus in his hi-tech lab. But it’s stolen by MI6 and when Shaw’s MI6 operative sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby) is caught in the act, she sees no alternative to injecting three capsules into her arm. This leaves our testosteronefuelled heroes with two options.
Either they kill Hattie and destroy her body or they break into Brixton’s Moscow lab, seize his capsule-removing machine and save both the girl and the world.You can probably guess which one they go for.
On the way, Leitch splurges his $200million budget on a string of action scenes.The most enjoyable
Andy Lea
THERE’S something about Holliday Grainger that makes casting directors think of corsets and pinafores. But the hugely talented British actress gets to try a new look in this gritty adaptation of Emma Jane Unsworth’s acclaimed novel.
Here the Great Expectations and Jane Eyre star rocks charity-shop chic to play a party-mad barista in modern-day Dublin. For the past