The Dwayne Johnson/Jason Statham Spin-Off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is Fun, If Way Too Long and Not as Good as Proper Sequels from this Era

It's okay but it's certainly no Fast 7. Or even Fast 8!

When I was attending probably my last Gathering of the Juggalos back in 2019 I had a little free time during the days because things didn’t really get started until night. 

At a theater close to where I was staying Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw was playing. I thought it would be the perfect context to see a vulgar spectacle like that, especially if I were to see it on what I like to call bonus drugs, which means anything beyond alcohol and marijuana. 

As is often the case I let the perfect moment pass and got around to watching and writing about the film for this beautiful website early in its run. 

I have vague but positive memories of enjoying Hobbs & Shaw as a campy, Cannon-style throwback to macho action comedies of the 1980s starring two massive action stars with wonderful senses of humor about themselves and the ridiculous world of fame and make-believe they inhabit. 

I was, at best, a casual fan of the Fast & Furious movies. I had not yet drunken the Kool-Aid. In Fast X a nefarious bad guy describes Dom and his family, not inaccurately or incorrectly, as a “cult with cars.” 

By this point I am most assuredly a member of that cult. Christ, I have wept at the endings of more than one of these spectacularly silly spectacles. I have strong feelings about the franchise and all of its players. 

So I was a little surprised to find myself moderately underwhelmed by the hit 2019 spin-off. It was amusing enough but I feel that it does not live up to the high standards of the later entries in the Fast & Furious series. 

I did not cry even a single time while watching Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw though I did get a little choked up at times. What can I say? I have all sorts of intense, weepy emotions where the Fast and the Furious franchise is concerned. 

This time around I actually found myself missing the ubiquitous conventions of the film. I was annoyed that whenever people talked about family here, it was inexplicably within the context of blood relations and not the greatest and purest form of family known to man: a colorful aggregation of speed-loving criminals-turned-heroes who have formed an unlikely but loving and supportive makeshift family 

Would it have killed the filmmakers to end things with a celebratory family barbecue? Or shoe-horned in a drag-racing scene to connect it to the first film? 

I even found myself missing the raspy gravitas Vin Diesel brings to the movies. Without his dour authority things can get a little silly. 

The title characters in Hobbs & Shaw are a study in contrast. One is a macho, muscular, wisecracking, bald alpha male who is slick with his mouth and his fists. The other is a macho, muscular, bald, wisecracking alpha male who is slick with his mouth and his fists but is also British. 

The film seems to realize that its mismatched buddy comedy features characters who are, if anything, too evenly matched. It continually flirts with the idea that they can’t stand each other precisely because they’re too similar. 

In the Fast and the Furious movies Hobbs and Shaw are less unusually skilled fighters, drivers and super-spies than invincible monsters as impervious to pain as robots. 

So Hobbs & Shaw has decided to pit them against a super-villain who actually is an invincible robot-man impervious to pain. 

Idris Elba plays Brixton Lore. Once upon a time Brixton was merely a super-spy with the body of a greek God. Then he nearly died after getting shot by Shaw and was transformed by the evil corporation Eteon into a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier, a killer android, a real-life Terminator. 

The Fast and Furious series has always had a stubborn disregard for reality, plausibility and verisimilitude but this marks the first time that it has openly embraced science-fiction by making its bad guy a psychotic robo-killer. 

Brixton and his evil overlords over at Eteon want to unleash a virus that will kill the weak and make way for the next brutal step of evolution, when the vulnerable will be slaughtered to make way for a race of robotically enhanced super-humans. 

Crazy to think that two such dissimilar figures were able to star in a movie together.

To that end they’ve corrupted a super-virus created by scientist Professor Andreiko (Eddie Marsan) that is inside an MI6 agent who happens to be Deckard’s similarly impressive sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby). 

There are numerous flashbacks to Deckard and Hattie getting into mischief as children. That implies that they’re roughly the same age when Statham is TWENTY years older than Hattie. 

You can fudge a year or two with something like that. You cannot fudge a decade or two, however. Then it becomes notable and distracting. 

Notable and distracting also describes uncredited appearances by Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Hart as a CIA agent and air marshal respectively. I hope you enjoy their shtick because judging by the film, director David Lietch, who worked with Reynolds on Deadpool, told his big name guest stars to just let it rip because every word out of their mouth promised to be pure gold. 

I like Reynolds. Within reason. And I like Hart. Sort of. They’re bearable, even entertaining in some contexts but their appearances here slow the film to a halt so that two of the biggest movie stars in the world can ham it up to their heart’s content. 

It’s not unlike how the latest Transformers movie is utterly enthralled with the comedy stylings of the ubiquitous Pete Davidson (who I also like, also within reason) to the extent that they clearly just told him to riff like a madman as the film’s comic foil. Davidson’s aggressive voiceover antics indelibly time-stamp the film as a product of the early two thousand and twenties. 

In its superior first hour Hobbs & Shaw is a goofy, macho action-comedy throwback with a terrific soundtrack of pop tunes. It gets more serious as it progresses but not in a particularly fun way. 

In its third act Hobbs & Shaw travels to another exotic location with special meaning to one of its stars: Samoa. Given the aggressively multi-cultural, diverse nature of these films it should not come as a surprise that the last half hour of Hobbs & Shaw is an exuberant tribute to the spirit and soul of the Samoan people. 

Hobbs has been estranged from his brothers since he turned in their old man for various crimes. The film’s rousing climax finds Eteon, an evil corporation obsessed with wiping out the human element from humanity so that androids can take over, battling a proud group of warriors fighting with the same weapons their ancestors fought with hundreds of years ago. 

Can a scruffy group without anything in the way of firepower or guns defeat a gang with all the firepower in the world AND a seemingly indestructible robot-man as their leader? 

They can if they’re in a Fast and the Furious movie and also if the bad guy’s guns don’t work. Moving the action to Samoa is a crowd-pleasing move in tune with the series’ global ambitions but there really is no reason this movie needed to last well over two hours long.

Watching all of the Fast and the Furious movies in one big sprint made me like Hobbs & Shaw less. It’s fun but exceedingly minor and not anywhere near as entertaining as the proper sequels from this era. 

This is actually the final piece I’m writing for this project, though I have yet to run articles on Fast 9 and Fast X that I’ve already written.

I’m gonna miss it! This project turned me into an unabashed fan of the series so I am a little bummed that I will have to wait two more years for my next fix of meat-headed super-action.