There’s no shortage of brotherly friction in Hobbs & Shaw. Actually, there’s way too much of it.
Hobbs & Shaw Movie Review
MI6 agent Hattie Shaw is forced to inject herself with a sleeper virus after her team is ambushed during an operation to retrieve that virus. She subsequently goes into hiding and is assumed by authorities to have gone rogue. To capture her, the CIA recruits Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw, the latter the estranged brother of Hattie. After the duo locates Hattie, they learn that she has been framed and that the real culprit is Eteon, a shadowy organisation obsessed with creating superior humans. They are also forced into a deadly confrontation with Brixton Lore i.e. Eteon’s biologically enhanced super-soldier who harbours a deadly grudge against Deckard Shaw.
Snappy Review
While I’ve never hated the Fast & Furious movies, I can’t say I’m a fan of the franchise.
Oh, they are visually fun for sure, with a slew of lovable and memorable characters to boot. The problem though, after a while, the movies all start to feel the same, yes?
Between the imaginative action sequences and the charismatic one-liners, there’s wafer-thin story. A lot of times, you don’t even wonder what’s going to happen next, because you know the movie will save the day the way it has long and always been doing.
The same goes for Hobbs & Shaw. As expected, the Rock and Jason Statham reprise their characters with finesse, never letting up the familiar banter even as they dive/drive from crisis to crisis.
Perhaps I was expecting them to, I don’t know, kiss at some point or something, this bickering quickly got dreary. Humourous as it was, there was just too much of it, with the movie also refusing to move on to deeper discussions such as the similarities between the two rivals. This similarity, incidentally, was strongly hinted at in the first half. But somehow, amidst all the mind-numbing action, it was all but forgotten. Everything subsequently was all about male bitching and name-calling, and little else.
One other thing i.e. the length of the movie, which some professional critics have commented negatively upon. In the middle of the Ukraine “arc,” it abruptly dawned upon me that, OMG, we haven’t yet gotten anywhere near the Samoan bits that were all over the trailers!
I’ll be lying if I say the realisation of this didn’t there and then made me groan. As moving as it is to see Dwayne Johnson pay tribute to his ethnic roots, this was frankly done at the cost of the story dragging on longer than it should. I was glad, very glad, when they finally got down to the final bash.
