Fast And Furious: Hobbs & Shaw - 7 Ups And 2 Downs
Green-light the sequel, and do it now.
The cinematic event of the century has finally arrived and, unless you've been living under a rock, in a cave, on mars, with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears going "alalalalala no movies please" you'll probably already be at least mildly excited for it. Fast And Furious: Hobbs And Shaw, a 6 word title that somehow repeats the word "and" but still represents Hollywood's latest mega franchise to get a spin-off.
With their addition to the series over the last number of films, both Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson have added major box-office clout to the Fast and Furious series. They were never going to be the leading lights ahead of Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez, so something like this was always going to be on the cards somewhere down the line.
But is it any good? Spinoffs are a bizarre sub-genre of movies and their success is rarely logical in context of their core movies. Sometimes you get a Star Wars: Rogue One, sometimes you get American Pie Presents...
UPS...
7. It Knows What It Is
Hobbs and Shaw is stupid.
The premise is stupid, the story is stupid, the action is stupid, the dialogue is stupid, the stunts are stupid, the entire third act, in particular, is so stupid that if it came to life and got to live as a person, it would wear a propeller hat late well into its late 30s and speak almost exclusively in Big Bang Theory quotes. Hobbs and Shaw, by virtually every way you'd care to quantify it, is stupid.
But it's also brilliant. Not brilliant in-spite of all this stupidity, but brilliant because of it.
Ultimately this a movie that could only have been born by a producer, carrying a briefcase that contains both Infinite Money and zero f***s, walked into a room with The Rock and Statham, calmly sat them down, and said "right then, tell me everything you want to do no here, and leave out no idea regardless of how impractical or nonsensical you think it might be".