Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) - Movie Review

Fast & Furious is a very silly film franchise. Sudden character death, sudden character resurrection/amnesia, overblown emotionality, pretences towards it all being families and sticking together; it’s basically soap opera for people who think the WWE doesn’t go far enough. It’s also a series that, as the years press on, I find myself gravitating closer and closer towards, appreciating them honestly as some of the best blockbuster action in cinemas these days and somewhat pretentiously for how it deals with the relationships between its many, many main characters.

And with its latest instalment, we have somehow dug even further into the realms of the ludicrous, setting up fan favourites Luke Hobbs (played by The Artist Formerly Known As The Rock) and Deckard Shaw (played by Guy Ritchie’s spirit animal Jason Statham) against Idris Elba as ‘Black Superman’, AKA an electronically-enhanced super-soldier. Even for this series, it’s wearing a lot of its own silliness on its sleeves, and it’s thankfully able to pull off every single factually-impossible thing that takes place here based on three crucial elements: The casting, the direction and the writing.

Back when I reviewed Furious 7, and said that I’d happily watch a whole movie of just Hobbs and Shaw throwing insults at each other… yeah, had no idea that that’s what I’d actually be getting a few short years later. Good thing their alpha-male chemistry holds strong here, making for equally capable physical and verbal sparring partners.

Alongside them, we have Vanessa Kirby as Shaw’s sister Hattie, who somehow manages to outclass them both in terms of action bravado. Not only does she sell the quips and the action scenes beautifully, she also all-too-easily could have been left out of the main action due to her involvement in the plot (read: carrier of world-ending super-virus). But no, even mid-techno-dialysis, she still throws down like the best of them. Oh, and Idris Elba is badass as usual.

While those four make up the main core of the character dynamic, meaning that Chris Morgan’s scripting doesn’t have to be stretched out as much as in the mainline F&F films, the real surprise comes with the supporting actors. We get Helen Mirren returning as mother Shaw, still sounding weirdly out of place with a British accent (still don’t know how the hell that works, but that’s the effect we get), but we also get Ryan Reynolds in prime scene-stealing form, Kevin Hart in easily the least useless performance I’ve seen from him so far, and the combined forces of Cliff Curtis, Roman Reigns and John ‘Shadow SPD Ranger’ Tui as members of the Hobbs clan. Has David Leitch been looking through my movie wish lists or something?

Speaking of Leitch, man, is he a good fit for this franchise. Not only does he know how to stage mesmerizingly cool action beats, he also understands action as a means of furthering the characters involved, i.e. how they fight shows how they are. And with Hobbs and Shaw, we get a similar deal to his work on Deadpool 2 in how he plays around with these two very different fighters to make the action scenes pop. Hobbs is the brick shithouse clotheslining soldiers into the pavement, while Shaw is the martial artist beating people down with a Champagne bottle; brute force vs. nimble finesse. It’s the kind of team-up you want going up against Black Superman (or Black Lantern Superman, given his origin, but we’ll let that slide), and while the set pieces themselves aren’t quite as good as those found in Furious 7 or Fate Of The Furious, they still work in establishing this entry’s own identity.

Which brings us to the writing, with series regular Chris Morgan aided by hit-and-miss writer Drew Pearce to deliver what we’ve come to expect from these movies. The plot doesn’t matter all that much, even for an over-two-hour film, but with how grin-inducing the banter can get and how on-point Leitch’s action staging is, that honestly becomes a non-issue very quickly. Where it gets interesting is how this ends up feeling like a natural extension of what the main series has been dealing with so far, mainly to do with family bonds and how far people go to protect those that they love.

Not only that, it ends up taking a lot of the subtext of the last few entries pertaining to technophobia and how much of a threat advanced tech can be to humanity and brings it roaring into flat-out text. Said roaring comes out mainly in a large-scale battle scene where the juxtaposition of low-tech and hi-tech makes for quite enticing viewing. That, and the Rock turning into his own version of Superman when it comes to dealing with a helicopter.

As a fan of the series already, and as someone who has been watching David Leitch’s career with great interest, I’m quite happy with what we’ve got here. It makes the best use out of everyone involved, from the cast to the behind-the-scenes crew to Tyler Bates once again bringing a pulsating soundtrack, and it even managed to deliver in areas I wasn’t expecting, like with Vanessa Kirby being made of crystallised badass and Kevin Hart not boring me to goddamn tears. Leitch has proven himself once again, and considering his next effort is reportedly going to be an adaptation of the video game The Division, it looks like he’s approaching his final test before we can outright declare him one of the greatest action directors of all time.