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This “Fast & Furious” spinoff featuring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham veers awfully close to rom-com territory.
By Wesley Morris
- Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
- Directed by David Leitch
- Action, Adventure
- PG-13
- 2h 15m
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 put-downs 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 movie throwing each other through glass windows and designer office furniture. This spinoff is more of the same. But, written by Chris Morgan, who’s handled most of the “Fast & Furious” movies, and Drew Pearce, it weighs less and seems to know that, too. 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” and who had a hand in the first “John Wick.” It has a good hip-hop soundtrack and the sort of coherent editing that you need for something with this much juxtaposed bone-breaking. The weightlessness, however, extends to a 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, and 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. “Jinx!” I thought to myself.
With the screen split, their bald heads — Johnson’s is smooth, Statham’s stubbled — are often inches from each other. And over the course of the movie, the tension between these two has so escalated amid the downpour of virility that by the time they’re on a plane arguing, again, over the sister (“I’m gonna let her climb this mountain. Over. And over”) those bald heads are all but knocking into each other. I was torn. Was the right response, “Get a room” or “Here’s a scrotum”?
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