David Leitch
Fast & Furious - Hobbs & Shaw

Do you remember Be Cool? It's the sequel to Get Shorty, that 1995 movie where John Travolta, a Miami loan shark, goes to Hollywood to collect a debt and ends up becoming a film producer. In the sequel, he tries to break into the music industry but is hindered by another producer and his bodyguard: a slimmer and less bulked-up Dwayne Johnson. The unique trait of The Rock's character is believing he has a bright future as an actor because he's able to raise one eyebrow at a time, thinking he exudes charisma and class, but instead causing much embarrassment.

In this Hobbs & Shaw, there's a scene where Hobbs displays the same eyebrow in front of his daughter, a Dwayne Johnson poking fun at himself. Otherwise, it feels like the start of Commando, where Schwarzenegger teaches his daughter the tricks of the Young Pioneers before wiping out enemy assault troops. It seems Johnson is keen on becoming the Schwarzenegger of the new millennium, with jokes about Terminator and descriptions of whom he'll kill first once freed from his chains, as in True Lies.

However, this film is not a long, noisy solo by our wrestler, at least in intent, because there's also Jason Statham doing his Jason Statham thing: jumping, punching, shooting, and driving only McLarens, repeatedly emphasizing, directly or indirectly, that he's British. Every time The Rock appears, instead, a huge American flag finds its place in the frame, and the concept that being a big bodybuilder is wonderful, and that one must drive only massive vehicles, is always reiterated.

Supporting these walking concentrations of testosterone is the sexy Vanessa Kirby, already seen in a vaguely interesting remake of Predator, involving drones, called Kill Command, where she played a cyborg woman capable of analyzing the vital parameters of people nearby, a trait here attributed to the enemy of the hour, an underwhelming Idris Elba, who talks too much to be a ruthless android and lacks the charisma to be a memorable antagonist, your classic real "bad guy."

Otherwise, we have the usual mishmash of improbable chases with cars jumping around like crickets, motorcycles riding by themselves and climbing walls like spiders, and generally poor special effects. The one-liners are always present, but we witness whole scenes where the atmosphere turns into that of an action comedy, like the aforementioned Get Shorty or the classic Beverly Hills Cop, but here it's not about arresting a Los Angeles drug dealer, it's always about saving the world. The trivialization of cinema à la 007 continues even when it turns out that one of the protagonists' special arms suppliers happens to be a bombshell in a bikini, like those who did AK-47 commercials in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, with Samuel L. Jackson turning up the volume on the remote to hear the sound better while those buxom ladies fired bullets abundantly. To me, honestly, it seems that mainstream action cinema has really gone off the rails, there’s no longer the slightest coherence in the characterization of events and characters. So much so that for the finale, a grand Samoan family reunion was prepared, in which, thanks to the natural strength of the homeland island, the evil cyber forces are defeated.

However, the trend of this film was predictable, so why write a review about it?
Because the villains of the moment want to exterminate humanity with a virus, fancy that, even though it's not an entirely new idea, but here there's also a lot of transhumanism involved, with a strong emphasis on the concept of improving the human being through technological implementations. The deep-state is represented by the usual secret paramilitary associations with Soviet bases, and the absolute leader is a mysterious masked voice. What disappointed me, in fact, was the ending: given the twist, I would have expected a cameo from Bill Gates who, at the moment of defeat, would say how important it is to insert chips under everyone's skin for the advancement of mankind and that releasing a virus from a Chinese lab is a small price to pay for achieving this noble goal.
Who knows, maybe when The Rock becomes governor of California we will know more about the hidden message of this film. And maybe, after another four years of Trump, we will see American fighter pilots again making hand gestures at the MiGs. All of this political correctness is starting to become nauseating, to be honest, seeing the remake of Red Dawn with North Koreans instead of Russians and Cubans, just because Kim Jong-un is the only one they can pick on, is somewhat ridiculous.

P.S. In the now customary scene after the credits, inevitably alas, there is Ryan Reynolds complaining that it's not fair that Jon Snow sleeps with his aunt and then kills her as if nothing happened.