Fast & Furi­ous: Hobbs & Shaw

There are few things as sat­is­fy­ing to our strange human brains as see­ing some­thing in slow motion. This explains the suc­cess of those YouTube chan­nels where peo­ple slow­ly slice bars of soap into cubes, and the Jack­ass films which used cut­ting-edge tech to show gross-out humour at 1/​10th of the nor­mal speed. It also speaks to one of the joys of the lat­est Fast & Furi­ous fran­chise entry, in which August Musger’s inven­tion is utilised to ludi­crous per­fec­tion. Dwayne John­son and Jason Statham, their fists con­nect­ing in per­fect, vio­lent har­mo­ny with Idris Elba’s chis­elled jaw­line. It’s the F&F equiv­a­lent of ASMR.

Repris­ing their roles as Secret Ser­vice agent Luke Hobbs and Spe­cial Forces Agent-turned-assas­sin-turned-mer­ce­nary Deckard Shaw respec­tive­ly, this film sees cinema’s lead­ing hard men part ways with Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toret­to. In Lon­don, Deckard’s lit­tle sis­ter Hat­tie (Vanes­sa Kir­by), a top MI6 agent in her own right, is a want­ed woman, set up as a trai­tor by the nefar­i­ous cyber-genet­ic agent Brix­ton Lore (Idris Elba) after she swipes a dead­ly virus from under his nose.

Hobbs and Shaw are tasked with bring­ing Hat­tie in and, giv­en their his­to­ry, they’re not exact­ly thrilled to be work­ing togeth­er – rolling their eyes and gri­mac­ing like sulky school­boys force to give a joint pre­sen­ta­tion as pun­ish­ment for a play­ground fra­cas. ​“I don’t like your big stu­pid head!” sneers Shaw, demon­strat­ing the best of what Chris Mor­gan and Drew Pearce’s script has to offer.

But that’s the thing: no one watch­es a Fast & Furi­ous film because they want hard-hit­ting dia­logue, or grit­ty real­ism, or sen­si­ble, log­i­cal plot devel­op­ment. The beau­ty of Hobbs & Shaw lies in its bom­bas­tic set-pieces, includ­ing an exhil­a­rat­ing car chase through the UK cap­i­tal (it’s actu­al­ly Glas­gow dou­bling for Lon­don) and a scene where The Rock brings down a heli­copter with noth­ing but a length of chain and his for­mi­da­ble biceps.

Elba amps up the the­atrics as the genet­i­cal­ly-engi­neered super-sol­dier who stands between Hobbs and Shaw and sav­ing the world, at one point glibly remark­ing ​“geno­cide schmeno­cide” in a tru­ly remark­able dis­play of male ego. For their part, John­son, Statham and Elba are ful­ly in on the joke. So too is David Leitch, who made his name as a co-direc­tor on John Wick before helm­ing Dead­pool 2, and who seems to under­stand the inher­ent ridicu­lous­ness of the fran­chise bet­ter than most – and also that these films have always been, at their core, painful­ly earnest.

Thus, the gang trav­els to Samoa for a slight­ly corny fam­i­ly reunion; Hobbs recon­nect­ing with his past in order to defeat a man who rep­re­sents a grim cyborg ver­sion of human­i­ty. Fam­i­ly, as much as big cars and big guns, has always been at the heart of the Fast & Furi­ous saga. Here, we see it in Hobbs mak­ing amends with his broth­er Jon­ah (Cliff Cur­tis) and moth­er Sefi­na (Lori Pelenise Tuisano), and Deckard reunit­ing with his sis and his dear old mum Mag­da­lene (Helen Mir­ren, repris­ing her role from The Fate of The Furi­ous).

Kir­by makes anoth­er strong case as an action hero­ine fol­low­ing her appear­ance in Mis­sion Impos­si­ble: Fall­out, although a roman­tic sub­plot between her and John­son feels con­trived, devoid of the chem­istry shared by the film’s war­ring male heroes – an odd cou­ple for the ages who bounce off each oth­er like sol­id steel spheres light­ing up a pin­ball machine. They move like dancers in their fight scenes, pirou­et­ting around count­less, name­less bad guys with the prac­tised con­fi­dence of men who were made for this. Men who know exact­ly who they are.

This is pure sug­ar rush cin­e­ma, off­set only by the short, sharp shock of the inevitable brain freeze that comes from slurp­ing it down too fast. A slew of cameos out­stay their wel­come, and none of it real­ly makes sense if you think too hard about it, but there’s some­thing delight­ful about the child-like won­der of it all. The fact it takes Hobbs and Shaw over two hours to realise that if they work togeth­er they will stand a bet­ter chance of defeat­ing their com­mon foe sug­gests they exist on a dif­fer­ent plain of exis­tence from the rest of us – one where macho pos­tur­ing isn’t just an indi­ca­tion of inse­cu­ri­ty but instead a legit­i­mate way of life.