Review of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

This was my first time seeing a Fast and Furious movie since the franchise started in 2001. I saw it with Friend for her birthday, because she loves Jason Statham and no one else in her life has low enough standards to see it with her besides me.

I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting. I guess the easy thing to say is that Hobbs and Shaw is not exclusively about fast and furious car races, but based on my knowledge of the F&F franchise from the trailers I have seen, mostly the people involved in these movies drive bigger things like submarines and maybe airplanes. There are some references to gay subtext and family history, Hobbs’s ne’er-do-well father and Shaw’s ne’er-do-well brother, that feel like they might be important elements of earlier films, but I feel like all of their motivations are really ancillary to the ultimate goal which is blow up things and then drive through the fire. It’s hard to know who to drool at more, Vanessa Kirby or Idris Elba, but I can’t help but think that if these action movies had been created in the late 2010s rather than the early 2000s that Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham would be the lead roles not Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez, something Filmhaus references in its podcast.

I don’t have a lot to go on in terms of how this compares to any of the other movies, but I have to assume that all of these scenes are callbacks to earlier movies where the gang goes to Kauai/Samoa to fight villains whose woke guns require fingerprints to work, or where Helen Mirren wears amazing prison outfits and steals the whole **** show, or where Ryan Reynolds plays Deadpool and steals the show, but again I can’t verify any of these facts on account of I’m not willing to sit through any other car chase movies. I want five to eighteen more years of Hobbs and Shaw sequels though.

I just assume all F&F films warrant hour-long podcast reviews and if anyone tells me otherwise I will be **** livid.