Stars' charisma carries Hobbs & Shaw

Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham in Hobbs & Shaw. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

The beauty of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw lies in the simplicity of its existence. This film’s reason for being resides solely in watching two of the biggest action stars in the world action their way through a series of explosions, because watching megastars banter and bicker is an American pastime. This is a pretty old recipe for success, defined around three decades ago but rarely repeated well in the ensuing decades. At the least, Hobbs & Shaw proves the recipe can still produce a fun, albeit very silly, movie.

Hobbs & Shaw stars Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as Hobbs and Shaw, who are brought together to find a virus currently in the possession of Shaw’s long-lost sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby). Hot on their trail is the committed Brixton (Idris Elba), a borderline cyborg who is part of an international cult dedicated to wiping out the weakest parts of the human race. Hobbs and Shaw must put away the differences carried over from two Fast and Furious movies to stop Brixton and once again save the world from nefarious forces.

Objectively speaking Hobbs & Shaw is not a particularly good film. The dialogue is dopey and hammy, existing as either lazy exposition or juvenile insults directed largely at levels of virility. The run time is overly long, filled to the brim and beyond with extraneous scenes and jokes that go far longer than they should. The story is bonkers and nonsense in the way that movies about technology with no understanding of how technology works are. It’s clear from the get-go this movie is a marketing ploy, especially in those awkward shots that highlight brand sponsors like McLaren. Hobbs & Shaw is fortunate to be a mediocre piece of filmmaking, just good enough to avoid the dustbin.

But, honestly, few if any of those problems matters for Hobbs & Shaw. A lot of the fun from this movie is a result of how gloriously dumb it is. All of the plot holes, silly dialogue, and the abundance of hyper-masculinity that stays just on the right side of toxic because of Hattie’s overarching competence are more selling points than flaws. Providing a proper critique for this movie is nearly impossible, because all of the things it does wrong are utterly immaterial to its sole purpose of watching Johnson and Statham bicker and punch their way around the world. And, well, there are far worse things to spend money on than watching the most charismatic action hero alive argue with a smooth talking Brit with a list of insults 40 meters long. Hobbs & Shaw sell Johnson and Statham, and the movie delivers exactly that with the added bonus of Elba as the villain and Kirby as a more than competent female protagonist.

Hobbs & Shaw is still a lot in both run time and action, often coming close to exhaustion because the loose plot while lacking the verve and energy of the best Furious films. Yet the insanity of it all carries it through, and director David Leitch escalates the explosions throughout to minimize the monotony. He uses as many excuses as possible to blow something up, because explosions are fun and interesting and allow Hobbs and Shaw repeated excuses to demolish the laws of physics. Leitch is also a capable action director, playing around with the fight sequences with Johnson and Statham are brutal and the booms are much larger than necessary.

Despite the super-modern tech, Hobbs & Shaw is a throwback to ’80s flicks like Lethal Weapon and Tango & Cash, buddy comedies where the action and the stars are more important than plot or logic. The film is an ode to a lost genre, a reminder that bankable stars can sell ridiculous stories based on star power alone. It’s a level of sincerity that’s missing with action movies, which often center so much on winks to the audience about the silliness of the expenditure the implausibility becomes a crutch instead of an asset. For movies like Hobbs & Shaw, the madness of impossibility is the attraction; the beauty and brilliance lies in the spectacle of Johnson and Statham driving through an exploding nuclear plant because it’s there to be exploded. Hobbs & Shaw isn’t art at its finest or most divine, but it’s still worth admiring for its bravado.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 135 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby

What Fell Short: Plot, Dialogue, Logic

What To Watch As Well: Fast Five, Furious Seven

The Meg is boldly stupid

A giant shark cruises through the buffet in The Meg. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

The Meg is big, brash, and tremendously inane. It’s uninterested in the nuances of good storytelling or concepts of logic in its plot, and it shows a blatant disregard for character development. This movie is audacious in its stupidity, and comes pretty close to being outstanding because of it.

 

The concept driving The Meg is pretty simple. It's an enormous shark (the eponymous Megalodon) trying to eat Jason Statham, as Jason Statham tries not to be eaten. That Jason Statham is not eaten immediately is impressive considering how often he offers himself up as a snack, but he does put up a valiant fight against the Meg. Fortunately for the shark, Statham has a lot of friends (Bingbing Li, Sophia Cai, Rainn Wilson, Cliff Curtis, Winston Chao, Ruby Rose, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor, Jessica McNamee, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, Masi Oka) to nibble on as it chases after Statham; some are munched, while others watch their friends get chomped. It all builds up to a climax where Statham tries to go Ahab on the shark, which is very much as nature plans when it introduces a giant shark and Jason Statham to each other.

Technically there is more to the plot than Statham vs. enormous eating machine, but it's clear The Meg doesn't care how the man fought the shark. How the shark came to be in the first place is an example of science as magic, because throwing a chart on a computer and saying a shark escaped is just enough to keep the story going. Statham has a dark past with the shark, for reasons that don't make sense even in the film's universe. The romantic subplot between Statham and Li exists because it apparently needs to exist, even though the movie tosses in an ex-wife subplot with McNamee that ultimately means nothing to the plot. Rose’s character is a master of technology and hacking, which is easy to tell because her name is Jaxx. Wilson is a billionaire who makes terrible decisions, because it apparently takes a special kind of dumb to become that rich.

 

What all of these components have in common is a lack of originality. The Meg leans so heavily on numerous tropes it almost breaks the crutch. Point after point after point after point has been done in a far better fashion before. Even the film's shocks and scares have been done so often there's little surprise when the shark just pops out and starts nibbling on people. The filmmakers play it up a lot, showing characters tempting fate more and more and building up to the point when, finally, the shark comes around to start eating some fools. Director Jon Turteltaub is no Spielberg when it comes to building drama and emphasizing fear; if there is an occasion for the shark to come around, it will come around to bite a person or two in half as quickly as possible.

That would be a demerit for almost every other movie, yet it works for The Meg. Because The Meg is first and foremost about the shark, and investing too much time into things unrelated to the shark is inefficient and reduces the shark to screen ratio. There is a point to having an otherwise uninteresting movie, which is to showcase the eponymous prehistoric creature and watch as it invades a popular beach, gobbling up everyone in sight. And it's the simplicity of the delivery that makes the movie fun. There are no lessons to be learned from this movie, no great speeches to be had nor points about society and nature worth learning. Audiences want to see a giant shark attack Jason Statham, and the audience sees a giant shark attack Jason Statham. Where this movie fails as cinema it succeeds at spectacle and economics. 

 

Because of that, The Meg plays a dangerous game. The line between good dumb fun and bad dumb fun is super thin and easy to cross, a fate that has befallen similar movies like Snakes on a Plane and Sharknado. There are certain slower points, when the focus on the shark starts drifting away, where the film's numerous flaws become an actual problem. The movie ultimately rights itself though, reverting the viewer's attention back to Statham as he fights against the shark again. Watching Jason Statham fight a shark is not good cinema, but it makes for a fun enough matinee trip.

Review: Three and a half out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 113 minutes

Genre: Action

tl;dr

What Worked: The giant shark, Jason Statham

What Fell Short: Less than spectacular special effects, basic filmmaking

What To Watch As Well: Deep Blue Sea, Orca, Piranha

Fate of the Furious doesn't mess with success

Charlize Theron and Vin Diesel in The Fate of the Furious. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

My adoration for much of the Fast and the Furious franchise entries is hypocritical given my overarching loathing for movies similar to Fast and the Furious. This franchise commits all the sins I rant and rail against committed by other franchises. They big and bloated movies with empty plots and little going for them aside from spectacle and frequent speeches about family. Some of this will be an attempt to explain why I love a series of movies with little connection to reality, because all of those reasons explain my joy of the most recent entry in the series, the fairly awesome The Fate of the Furious.

There isn't anything overly different with Fate of the Furious compared with the rest of the franchise, the exception being the absences of Jordana Brewster and the late Paul Walker. The rest of the main cast is back (Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson, Dwayne Johnson) along with a few additions from the last film (Kurt Russell, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jason Statham) and two new players (villain Charlize Theron and agent Scott Eastwood). Ridiculous heists are pulled in locales across the world; the word “family” is referenced ad nauseam; Johnson and Statham drop a few quips; beautiful cars get totaled; beautiful people get ogled; and a whole host of other similar shenanigans ensue. It’s the same as every film in this franchise since Fast Five, the one where the series shifted toward the globetrotting model it currently follows to enormous box office returns and at least two more entries in this series through 2021.

Looking at this film and the rest of the series critically little of it really holds up. The plots are thin and lack general logic. The movies always run on the long side despite the thin plots, with the less engaging entries losing steam in between the grandiose action sequences (a problem that plagues Fate of the Furious). Diesel, the face and de facto heart of the franchise, continues his tradition of not putting that much effort into his performance as Dominic Toretto. The amount of time the camera spends on certain female body parts remains a little disconcerting. And the films are generally hesitant to try to engage viewers in too many intellectual challenges.

Yet I still leave the theater pumped after watching these ludicrous movies. For all the flaws the series has, the positives have outweighed the negatives as a whole since Fast Five. Diesel's acting remains an issue, but he's surrounded by enough personality from the likes of Rodriguez, Johnson, Russell, Statham, Gibson, Russell and Ludacris to make his inherent lack of emotional range sort of work in his favor. Adding in Theron as the Fate of the Furious’ big bad is a boon as well; her iciness and scenery nibbling make her an unpredictable and surprisingly vicious femme fatale. Movies like this don't necessarily need great acting to work; a surplus of personality is often just as effective.

Besides, the real selling point for this franchise and Fate of the Furious is the spectacle. There's a simple level of joy to be taken solely from watching Vin Diesel race someone while driving backwards in a car that's on fire, or watching the main cast somehow avoid a freaking submarine while driving on ice covered water in Russia. There's the sequence where Theron makes it rain with cars, a helicopter getting taken out by an EMP, Johnson using his arm to divert a torpedo, and a pretty solid prison riot highlighted by stompings put on by Johnson and Statham. Just writing those things down is ridiculous enough, but the fact the film commits to these feats with a level of normality is fascinating in its own right. Whatever reaction the characters have to all of this insanity is a few steps below how it should play out in real life.

But this series is based in fantasy, a point the various directors who have come and gone have generally agreed upon. Anything can happen in the Fast and the Furious universe, and the only thing the filmmakers can do from one film to the next is stretch what anything means. It's fun to watch them get more and more creative without quite hitting the point of desperation. And while Fate of the Furious never hits the level of absurdity that makes Fast Five and Furious 7 so entertaining, it's still a damn fun film.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 136 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks who've lined up to watch the last seven movies.

Take the whole family?: This one gets a little bloodier than some of the previous ones, so stick within a year or two of the PG-13 rating.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater is good, but maybe avoid the IMAX if it isn’t a matinee.

What do they do about Paul Walker?: Even though the actor died before the release of Furious 7, his character Brian is referenced in this one as being alive but retired, just as he was at the end of the previous film. It was kind of nice to see the filmmakers avoid overly inserting Walker (sadly at the expense of Jordana Brewster), but a scene at the end makes for a strange coda given the circumstances.

Watch this as well?: Fast Five remains the glorious, bonkers highlight of this franchise. I'm also a very enthusiastic fan of Furious 7 even with the reduced Dwayne Johnson presence; adding in Kurt Russell and Jason Statham proved to be nice touches.