It
bespeaks the popularity of a movie franchise when its secondary characters
warrant a spin-off of their own, and the latest example is ‘Hobbs & Shaw,’
or rather ‘Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw’ spawned from the (you
guessed it) inexplicable box office success of the ‘Fast & Furious’
franchise which began rather humbly and inauspiciously back in 2001. With each successive installment, F&F has
only proven to be more and more over-the-top and preposterous in its impossible
and laws of physics-defying automotive derring-do and shenanigans. Then again,
we can hardly blame Hollywood for pandering to the moviegoing masses now, can
we?
H&S
brings together two of F&F’s key supporting characters, Dwayne Johnson’s
muscular Diplomatic Security Service (State Department’s “Secret Service”) agent/good guy Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s brooding British badass/former villain Deckard Shaw, as they join forces to stop a sinister and all-powerful supra-national organization called HYDRA, I mean "Eteon" from causing worldwide
apocalypse by releasing a deadly and very nasty virus that can destroy us from
within, while also saving Shaw’s MI6 agent sister Hattie in the process (who
injected herself with the virus before going on the run to keep it from the bad
guys at Eteon, but don’t worry because it has a delayed time release which
gives her plenty of time to get it out after the coast is clear). The bad guy tasked to secure the virus is
Brixton aka “Black Superman” (Idris Elba), an old colleague of Shaw’s whose
head he placed a bullet in earlier but was brought back by Eteon as a
genetically enhanced “Six Billion Dollar Man” of sorts to do their dirty deeds.
As
you might have surmised based on previous installments, H&S’s plot isn’t much to speak of and could easily have been concocted by a bored and
not-so-imaginative 10-year old during a lunch break. It’s little more than an excuse to bring two of F&F’s
most macho men together to "save the world,” banter with one another for two
hours because they “can’t stand each other” and – of course
– to give us more of the testosterone-fueled madness we’ve all come to expect and love from the franchise. Or have we?
Grade: C
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