Film Review : Hobbs and Shaw

This was in the bargain bucket for a fiver and as we have all 8 Fast and Furious movies, we thought, why not.
I am relieved to say that none of the cast in the original films made a cameo appearance, and where those were all about the cars with some decent story lines, this……….. wasn’t.
There was plenty of action in the first ten minutes though, as an elite SAS team were sent to retrieve a virus that had got into the wrong hands. The team is killed by the bad guys trying to stop them, bar one survivor who takes the virus and gets away.
IMO Statham (born July 1967) is showing his age, and this has to be one of the few films I’ve seen him in where he doesn’t get his kit off to ripple the biceps and six pack.
The Rock (born May 1972) lives up to his name, but for me there was no chemistry as the one-liners were there, but didn’t come across as they had in the original franchise.
The story was patchy, disjointed, and hard to follow who was good, bad or had once been on the opposite side. There was a neat twist with the heroine (which I won’t spoil) and she’s certainly someone to have on your team.
Hobbs comes out with one of the best lines about fighting a black terminator as the bad guy (Idris Elba), who was once on the good side, refuses to die no matter what you throw at him, even a truck and a concrete chimney.
It’s fun in a juvenile sort of way, and the kids would love it for the computer graphics, plus there is little, if any bad language that I noticed. The fight scenes are well choreographed, especially when modern weapons have been removed by Momma, and our good guys have to fight the bad with clubs and scythes. Hobbs looks good in Samoan battle dress.

Several things spoilt it though. The (c)Rap music in between earlier scenes was irrelevant, distracting, and not even good, and the two scenes with Ryan Reynolds should have been left on the cutting room floor. The first, in a diner with Hobbs and his daughter, had the most pathetic and stupid dialogue which didn’t make any sense and wasn’t even funny, so could have been done in less than two sentences. The second, more rubbish dialogue, was after the credit roll, supposedly leading you towards wanting to buy the sequel.

No thank you. I have no interest in knowing who the mystery voice was calling the shots.
No disrespect to our heroes acting ability, but it didn’t transfer well as an off shoot from a popular franchise with Vin Diesel et al.
Hubby gave it a 5, and I gave it somewhere between

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