IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched in the cinema
In one scene in the "Fast & Furious" spin-off "Hobbs & Shaw", the two eternal rivals Luke and Deckard run through an underground giant garage in which one luxury car follows the other. As usual, the sly-eared Hobbs, embodied by Dwayne Johnson, notices that somebody has something to compensate, before the scene dissolves into a charming punch line, which I don't want to spoil at this point.
Why do I start with this excerpt from the film? Because when I think of the word "compensation" I don't just think of the umpteen different vehicles in which the good guys and the bad guys in "Hobbs & Shaw" are on the road, but above all of the prehistory of the production. At first "Fast & Furious" family head Vin Diesel expressed his skepticism towards an offshoot without his presence, shortly afterwards Tyrese Gibson also acted like a primadonna and even blamed Dwayne Johnson himself for the fact that the start of "Fast & Furious 9" was postponed by a whole year due to the cinema release of "Hobbs & Shaw". All this didn't help, but it throws a bad light on the cohesion of the crew, who are always so passionately celebrating their "We Are Family" credo in front of the camera. But maybe it's also not so wrong that the two advantages of previous "F&F"-movies have now been separated from each other in order to go through their own thing. The two don't take all the chaos and nonsense around them so seriously anymore.
Several trailers for "Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw" were released in advance. One of them was a trailer, which was about four minutes long. Compared to the two and a quarter hours the movie takes in the end, that's not much. But at the same time, the trailer seemed to anticipate all the bizarreness of the film, from an escape on foot along a mirror-smooth house wall to a rescue manoeuvre in which Dwayne "Muscle Mountain" Johnson holds a helicopter to the ground with mere muscle power (!). And since the two previous films "Fast & Furious 7" and "Fast & Furious 8" already hit the shit, it becomes successively more difficult for each further franchise part to top the past.
And I already have a small damper ready for the inclined "F&F" audience: "Hobbs & Shaw" doesn't offer a further increase to the gaga stunts of previous films. Although Hobbs, Shaw and their adversary Brixton (aka "The Villain", aka "Black Superman") deliver some stupid fights and chases, the last bit of madness is missing. Maybe that's because Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham have already been in almost every (un)possible situation in life and you just can't be shocked by any of the most outrageous scenes. But maybe it's just director David Leitch, who in case of doubt prefers a high quality staging of the fight choreographies, rather than still putting a top on it.
The co-director behind the first "John Wick" has made a steep career as Hollywood's "man for the rough" after his Keanu Reeves action vehicle. After "Atomic Blonde" and "Deadpool 2" he is also not stingy with violence in "Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw". His new movie isn't very explicit, but in contrast to many comparable action movies on PG-13 level you can hear and see a lot of noise in close-ups. Especially the finale reminded me of Leitch's debut work.
Nevertheless, the filmmaker seems to be overwhelmed with his own handwriting in between. The stagings of the individual action setpieces range from minimalist-coarse like the final fight, to wacky-playful to cool and wacky - just as if Leitch wanted to prove his complete range as a director and choreographer, what makes "Hobbs & Show" look like piecework from a staging point of view - by the way, this also applies to the use of computer effects, which sometimes look really strong, then again quite awkward. This even varies within a single scene at times.
Each stunt has its own qualities, but the elements can't yet fit into a big whole. More positively spoken, this also helps the movie to have an enormous fun. And that's very important in a 138-minute monster, especially when the film pushes a very flat story in front of it, apart from its action scenes. You can't help but suspect a wink when the characters pronounce words like "virus extraction device"; just as if they had just come up with them. Because that's how honest you have to be: In the best franchise manner, this is once again not about why the main characters have to go from A to B, but about how.
These are joined by Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham - both in top form once again and never embarrassed to laugh at each other, but above all at themselves - as well as Vanessa Kirby, who is no less touchy. The blonde beauty already showed her fighting abilities in "Mission: Impossible - Fallout" and seems as a renegade MI6 agent, as if she had stumbled directly from "Fallout" to the next movie set. The British actress not only distributes, she ennobles every brute man-on-man fight for filigree moves and thus provides variety, when isolated action scenes threaten to lose themselves in redundancy. On the other hand, Helen Mirren, who only appears behind bars for a few short scenes in the role of Shaw's mother Queenie, seems to have given away a bit.
At least David Leitch can compensate for this displeasure by coming up with some undreamt-of cameo, which nobody really saw coming.
