Fast and furious presents: Hobbs and Shaw

Released: 1st August 2019 (UK)
BBFC Rating: 12A
Directed By: David Leitch
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Vanessa Kirby, Idris Elba
The Fast movies have been slowly moving away from their history in street car racing and the gang style movies of the originals, and more towards the traditional action flick, with the first of the spin offs; Hobbs and Shaw, being the one which almost entirely tips the series away from being a car movie and towards a movie featuring some cars. It focuses, as the title suggests, around Agent Luke Hobbs ( Johnson ) and Mercenary ( Statham ) teaming up together to take down electronically enhanced assassin Brixton ( Idris Elba ) as he aims to find a programmable bio weapon. Simply from that description of the film you can see it is starting to take a very silly tone, however its hard to tell from the film whether it is presenting the plot ironically or is trying to take itself seriously. I went into this expecting that it would be a wild ride of a film, something that I didn't like about the last Fast movie, as it got just a bit to silly for me. However in a film where Jason Statham and the rock fight a cyborg for a digital weapon its very hard not to enjoy the stupidity. The whole film manages to keep the action going without much progression of story, with very unsubtle plot devices laced through by the characters throughout, then jumping back to another action sequence. However unlike films such as John Wick which work off of very simple story devices, it is quite hard in this to keep up with everything that is going on, as it tries to set up certain things early on in the film that you have simply forgotten about by the end. This is especially surprising considering how simple it tries to male everything for the audience in each filler scene, before the next action scene throws it all away and you get lost again. The third act of the film for me is what really started to lose me however, with the sudden realisation that characters need to work together crashing into the story line and they all start to hammer down to the audience that their friends now by referring to each other as ' brother ' for a good chunk of the movie. This is also tied with extended sequences of random characters just bro fisting each other for a good ten minutes of the movie which after a while just seemed a bit cringe worthy. While all that exists throughout however it is good fun when you don't take it too seriously, which a film like this really shouldn't be. It really does try to give you a simple action movie with references and cameos to get you into it and action spectacles to keep you going. Overall the series has realised now that its not supposed to be too serious and the film does well to follow a new direction for these characters.
Contains Moderate Violence and Frequent bad language as well as mild torture scenes.
My rating: 7.1/10

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