Baldness is apparently the result of testosterone overabundance. Which is why four hulking, behind-kicking, bald, bad boys (Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, and Tyrese Gibson) proved to be too much baldness and ego for one franchise (“Fast & Furious") to handle.
The franchise was split neatly in half, so everyone could remain alive. Then again, maybe the alleged bad blood on previous bald-bad-boy movie sets was just controversy and buplicity. I mean publicity.
Well, OK, it’s the same yet different. “Hobbs & Shaw” is missing the sexy American muscle-car porn. (It does have Statham’s European, classy, high-performance McLaren, along with Johnson’s Harley-Davidson.) It does have muscle trucks.
“Hobbs & Shaw” keeps the third “F” of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, which has long been known to be “family,” but now family becomes Dwayne Johnson’s giant, fictitious Samoan family.
What Goes On
He of (now widely known) Samoan heritage, Dwayne Johnson, is that self-same, self-described, “brown, tattooed ... mountain of a man,” Defense Security Service agent Hobbs, he’s always been.Vanessa Kirby plays Shaw’s sister, M16 agent Hattie Shaw. Idris Elba plays the bad guy Brixton, who’s a techno-enhanced, super-soldier/agent for an underground military organization called Eteon.
Well, Shaw was originally a very bad guy, a killer in the previous car movie franchise, and the whole family is pretty much con-artist-y. Helen Mirren plays their mother and she’s in jail, but she breaks out of jail when the feuding siblings reunite. Hattie is on the good-guy side.
What does Eteon do? In Bond-villain-like fashion, it’s intent on world domination via the spreading of a deadly virus. But whoa! Hattie absconds with this virus. And to save humanity, she injects herself with all the biohazardous evil while in the back of a fleeing enemy truck—and then she jumps off the truck! Now, there’s only days left before she becomes toxic and deadly! Aaaaannd scene.
Lastly, there’s a finale involving indigenous Samoan weaponry (various ornate staffs and clubs) versus hi-tech firearms! How does that work?! Well! I’m not going to tell you that. You’ll have to see for yourself, because it’s all very ingenious. It involves hi-tech gone wrong.
And one more thing—there’s a tug of war between a Black Hawk helicopter and a series of linked-together muscle trucks! I strongly suspect it’s inferred that Samoan men are simply too mountain-like of stature to tinker with the tiny muscle cars that Vin Diesel likes to drive, in the other bald-headed series. So that’s what goes on.
How’s the Acting?
What?! Shut up. Acting! Pffft. Actually, the Hobbs-Shaw relationship may constitute the most high-speed ping-pong game of an alpha-male insult fest ever to scorch the big screen. It’s nonstop. It requires great cardio, with each volley consisting of full-on verbal smashes; each smash is returned without missing a beat. This actually takes acting ability, and Johnson gets incrementally funnier with each film he does.
Acting-wise, Idris Elba cannot be bad, even when given an empty villain to play. And, as mentioned, while the third F in F&F that stands for “family” is here represented by a giant pack of Samoans, the whole thing, while strong in tribal tats, beards, and primitive weaponry, is a bit family-lite.
