★½ (1.5 out of 4 stars) - When it comes to the blockbuster action movie, three franchises remain. There is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other assorted comic book pictures, y'know, for kids; Tom Cruise, most clearly for the ever stellar Mission: Impossible series, wilfully forgetting Jack Reacher but with shoutouts to American Made, Edge of Tomorrow, and the upcoming Top Gun sequel, sure to be a success; and then there's The Rock...
(1.5/4)
Director: David Leitch | Producers: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Chris Morgan, Hiram Garcia | Screenplay: Chris Morgan, Drew Pearce | Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby, Eiza González, Cliff Curtis, Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Kevin Hart, Eliana Sua | Music: Tyler Bates | Cinematography: Jonathan Sela | Editor: Christopher Rouse
When it comes to the blockbuster action movie, three franchises remain. There is the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other assorted comic book pictures, y’know, for kids; Tom Cruise, most clearly for the ever stellar Mission: Impossible series, wilfully forgetting Jack Reacher but with shoutouts to American Made, Edge of Tomorrow, and the upcoming Top Gun sequel, sure to be a success; and then there’s The Rock. Of the three The Rock most resembles the action movie star of old. While the Terminator squeaks on tarnishing its legacy, and the Rocky series rejuvenated with Creed albeit in more of a minor key, The Rock has revived the disaster movie thanks to San Andreas and the Die Hard-lite Skyscraper, rolling the dice on Jumanji while breathing new life into Baywatch, even as a one-off.
His most successful box office role however remains as Luke Hobbs in The Fast and the Furious films, one of the biggest franchises of all time with a combined gross of over $5 billion. His debut in the role with Fast Five back in 2011 marked a shift from the early focus on muscle cars and the subculture of street racing to more conventional big-budget action rooted in criminal heists. Since then – put a pacifier in Vin Diesel – it’s really been The Rock’s franchise as much as anyone’s, and after the turn towards cyberterrorism and secret agents in 2017’s The Fate of the Furious, Hobbs & Shaw, the series’ first true spin-off, carries on in much the same vein. Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) are special agents respectively connected to the CIA and MI6, who with the help of Shaw’s MI6 field-agent sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby) must bring down a terrorist organisation, and their genetically modified baddie Brixton Lore (Idris Elba).
Perhaps Hobbs & Shaw meets the expectations set by other films in the franchise; perhaps for many action fans the lure of bromance between Johnson and Statham will prove impossible to resist. Hobbs & Shaw is not a good film though. Its plot is contrived beyond recognition, it makes shoddy use of its supposedly exotic locales, and its relationships are barely plausible never mind meaningful, content with crashing together a handful of names.
The Rock is steady as always, and Vanessa Kirby – much like in Mission: Impossible – Fallout – well suits the role. She can play the ingenue but with a sense of street-smarts and knowing, remaining an outsider with a frisson of intrigue while fitting seamlessly into the world. She adds energy to the action sequences, and with The Rock she makes for an interesting couple. But Jason Statham is the masturbatory fantasy of mediocre manhood: the suggestion that an ostensibly dim and scarcely talented bald man can be a panty-wetting attraction with a bit of muscle and a broad accent. Everybody after all can work out. It’s strange though that for someone whose whole schtick depends on it, he still hasn’t mastered the Cockney or any other sort of accent: his readings wander in and out over the course of a line with all the wrong emphases, inevitably ruining the flow. The witty repartee which The Rock is more than capable of with Statham as the foil falls flat. So instead of boisterous exchange, the best scenes between Johnson and Statham are those where they interact as little as possible: the introductory passages for instance, which contrast their morning routines in London and L.A.
The action sequences in Hobbs & Shaw are not particularly memorable. There’s an early car chase, and an extended episode inside the terrorist organisation Eteon’s headquarters – supposedly in Ukraine, but in fact filmed at a power station in Yorkshire – which depends on the location more than the generic action therein. When Hobbs makes a belated return to his childhood home in Samoa, his family amount to nothing more than types and the dramatic tension is barely sustained. When Brixton and Eteon invade the island to extract a supervirus from Hattie, the climactic battle does at least incorporate one novel action sequence, in which our eponymous duo chain together trucks to act as a counterbalance, eventually bringing down Brixton’s helicopter at the end of a perilous chase. A note on Idris Elba, who looks jowly and is underserved as the villain.
Ryan Reynolds adds nothing as Hobbs’ CIA handler Locke, and might as well have stayed at home. On the other hand Kevin Hart – another uncredited actor apparently doing a favour – as overexcited air marshal Dinkley steals the show. The only real chemistry in the movie is between The Rock and Eliana Sua, who plays Hobbs’ daughter Sam. The framing scenes which star Helen Mirren as ‘Queenie’ Shaw, Deckard and Hattie’s mother, are utterly risible and get the family off on the wrong foot.
