Ever since the Fast and Furious franchise reinvented itself as "Mission: Impossible with cars", it has regularly churned our sequel after sequel. There was an announcement a while back that the series would end at the 10th movie, but apparently they weren't counting spinoffs in that number.
The first such movie, Hobbs and Shaw, is directed by David Leitch, who also brought us Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2. As fans of the series can probably guess, it stars now-series regulars Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as the title characters, a powerlifting cop who performs extracurricular activities, and a fearless villain-turned-antihero. Franchise newcomers include Vanessa Kirby as Hattie, the surprise third member of the buddy-cop duo, and Idris Elba as Brixton, this movie's freak of the week and resident Terminator-style bad guy.
The movie knows exactly what it is and what it's doing, and it knows how to have fun doing it. The story is mostly nonsense and just a great excuse to give us over-the-top action and to make my popcorn taste better. The chemistry between the leads is amazing. You can tell how much Statham and Johnson are enjoying being on set together with the two cracking one-liners at each other throughout the entire movie, and I'd be willing to bet that most of said one-liners are unscripted.
One thing you could hold against the movie, though, is that it tries to do too much. There are probably four or five different motivations the writers gave our protagonists for riding out the plot when one might have sufficed: villain tries to steal world-ending virus. In their defense, the other plotlines give Hobbs and Shaw reason to stick around when really anybody else could have been chosen to do the job. But the issue is also exemplified by the fact that the movie has two separate climaxes (climaces?) and THREE mid/post-credits scenes... not that I minded, because the two latter scenes were hilarious, and the second climax includes some creative stunts I've never seen before, culminating in an awesome final fight. It really didn't know when to end, but if you ask me, it's all just more of a good thing.
Speaking of which, although the movie wraps up pretty well, they leave us with a sequel hook that sets up another spinoff. Is it wrong of me to hope they call it 2 Hobbs 2 Shaw?
