When the children who invented the awesome and not-at-all-forgettable character names “Hobbs” and “Shaw” for Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, respectively, do you think they ever imagined seeing their creations on the marquee? I would imagine they couldn’t remember what they’d named their characters the day after they created them. And yet, here we are – in an entertainment world of titular names that speak volumes -like Forrest Gump and Erin Brockovich– we have, instead, added to the Mortdecai pile of ways to distinguish the title of your movie without invoking a single additional thought.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is a silly film. It started silly; it meandered through sillyworld, and just when you think it couldn’t get sillier, Act III reduced a high-tech, genetically engineered world-at-stake crisis involving spies and terminators to a stick fight on the island of Samoa. Did I mention there was a clock on this endeavor? They had to get from Russia to Samoa in, I dunno, something like ten hours. Listen, if you can get from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere to Samoa within ten hours of first reading this sentence, I will give you $10,000.*
Cashing in on the Fast & Furious label, two plucky unknown latecomers have branched off the FF highway to get their own film. Isn’t that sweet? Let me introduce a Mr. Dwayne Johnson and a Mr. Jason Statham. Give ‘em a big hand. We expect big things out of these kids … don’t let us down!
Despite sequential chronology, the Fast & Furious franchise is written for goldfish. You need know absolutely nothing about what went on before in franchise history to enjoy any given adventure. This is great, because I can’t even remember how many Fast & Furious films there are, let alone what happened in them. I think one of them had a sports car … but I could be misremembering. In this version, Hobbs (Johnson) and Shaw (Statham) are agents who have to recover a deadly virus that will wipe out half the world if released. Meanwhile, the virus has been injected into Shaw’s sister and fellow badass, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), who is in turn being pursued by human 
Terminator Brexit, er, I mean Brixton (Idris Elba). Oh, and Hobbs and Shaw don’t get along – like don’t even get along enough to put their differences aside when the fate of the world is on the line; now, that’s some petty crap.
That’s all you need to know. The rest is a series of motorcycle stunts and insult humor. You might imagine I hated this film. I did not. I hate kinda everything this film is about and the cynical way it has been delivered, but the film itself is more-or-less entertaining. It contains scenes like Brixton and pals breaking into a secret CIA holding facility fifty floors up, stealing Hattie and rappelling out the smashed window. Is it enough that Dwayne the Johnson-Rock goes out the window after them, twice or thrice deciding that gravity is faster than any rappel – and if you think this sight reminded me of his “aim for the bushes” moment in The Other Guys, you’re damn right. No, that wasn’t enough. Shaw decides “he don’t play that” and breaks the brakes on the external elevator so that he can have a combo front row/skybox view of Rock vertically disposing of bad guys. Yes, this is silly. Did I enjoy it? Yeah, I did.
In fact, the film really had me until Samoa. I could handle all the high tech spy stupidity right up to the moment where the Johnson-Rock (a highly placed CIA agent, mind you) decides the one guy in the world who can fix the broken virus-extraction machine is his brother, a Samoan mechanic. At one point in the sequence of stupidity that followed, the Brixton copter is threatening to drop a chain of good guy vehicles off a cliff unless they can find something heavier to keep them on land … huh, you guys need something heavy and Samoan, huh? Have you tried calling the offensive line coach for the University of Hawaii football team?
I neither wish to encourage nor discourage films like this from being made. I don’t believe a single thing about them, but I cannot deny their entertainment value. This Fast & Furious iteration has, yet again, made more futile attempts at messages of family unity. Stow that shit, Jeeves; just show a car crashing out of one building and into another. That’s all we need to see.
When a virus comes right to our door
The fate of the world’s now in store
From UK to Russia
The villains will crush ya
Have you had enough, or do you need Samoa?
Rated PG-13, 137 Minutes
Director: David Leitch
Writer: Chris Morgan and Drew Pearce
Genre: Toddlertainment
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: One not impeded by logic or consequences
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: If Fast & Furious filmmaking ain’t your bag, this is no time to start
*I’m not actually waging $10,000, but only to discourage pedantic idiocy. For a lark, wherever you are, book a theoretical trip to Samoa for the Hell of it and see how quickly you could get there if you had to.
