‘Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw’

The people who made “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” know that Dwayne Johnson (Luke Hobbs) and Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw) have an easy adversarial chemistry. They build the movie around their putdowns and pranks.

Statham stays focused on how Johnson’s size makes him seem kind of dumb and unsubtle. And Johnson picks on what an indecipherably British hobbit Statham is. At some point, Hobbs gets a load of Shaw’s stable of sports cars and asks if he’s, uh, overcompensating.

Seems right for two people — an American agent and an English mercenary — who spent an exciting sequence at the top of the seventh “Fast & Furious” movie throwing each other through glass windows and designer office furniture. This spinoff is more of the same.

David Leitch directed it, and the fights and chases achieve a kind of smooth brutality that makes sense for the maker of “Atomic Blonde” and the second “Deadpool.” It has a good hiphop soundtrack and the sort of coherent editing that you need for something with this much juxtaposed bone-breaking.

The weightlessness, however, extends to a › Rating: PG-13 › Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes

plot that makes no sense, and involves an extinction-level virus that Shaw’s intelligence-agent sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), has heroically injected into herself — and that doesn’t at all diminish her agility, wit or capacity for flirtation.

The filmmakers so want to maintain the joshing between Johnson and Statham that the movie’s ostensible action label and the lust Shaw fears Hobbs has for his sister feel like pretexts for the romantic comedy “Hobbs & Shaw” virtually is.

Idris Elba plays the movie’s biomechanically enhanced supervillain. Not that far into things, he wonders aloud who’s going to stop him. So, for an answer, there’s a cut to a split screen of Johnson and Statham in their respective beds. Each is going about his day — waking up, eating, exercising, taking phone calls simultaneously with the exact same response.

With the screen split, their bald heads — Johnson’s is smooth, Statham’s stubbled — are often inches from each other.

It’s serious enough between them that anytime the movie presents alternative partnerships in the form of cameos by other, more naturally funny male stars, Hobbs and Shaw decline.

And that gives a ridiculous sensuality to the climactic three-way beat down and the way the frame speed decelerates enough for every punched face and kicked head to seem like a caress, as if they were Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze at her pottery wheel in “Ghost.”

None of that makes “Hobbs & Shaw” better. It doesn’t save the movie from a saggy setup for the showdown, in Samoa.

Estrangement is the movie’s big theme — Shaw hasn’t seen his sister in ages, and Hobbs swore he’d never go back to that island (meaning his smart 9-year-old daughter has never met her formidable grandmother). The movie doesn’t care about the strains in these relationships, so why strain them? Nothing changes if Hobbs and his brother (Cliff Curtis) are on good speaking terms. They’d still assemble dozens of their siblings and cousins for the finale’s assorted phases. They’d still figure out how to affix a bunch of trucks to a flying chopper. It’s just more pretext.