Okay, Maybe That's Enough Fast And Furiouses For Now

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One of the earliest signs that the Fast and Furious film franchise has finally flown too close to the sun comes within the first 10 minutes of Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, the ninth installment in the now 18-year-old series.

Luke Hobbs, a greased bowling ball and bounty hunter (freelance) played by The Rock “Dwayne” Johnson, confronts his first victim by revealing how he learned of said victim’s illicit behavior: “I’ve been hearing a lot of dark web chatter,” he says, to the viewer’s deep humiliation. If you can imagine a gigantic steak in a too-tight denim jacket saying, “I’ve been hearing a lot of dark web chatter,” before pummeling some guy this way till Tuesday, then you know all you need to know about this already ill-conceived spinoff: It is dumb. Not the good kind of dumb, either. Just dumb. You heard it here first, in this dark web chatter.

As if to put the final nail in the coffin before we even get to the film’s exposition, Hobbs then grabs the closest tattoo gun and inks “I LOVE COPS” onto the man’s forehead. Anyone with even a modest knowledge of the Fast and Furious canon knows that Hobbs is not remotely light-handed enough for the tattooing profession and is himself a cop (freelance), so it’s not clear if this is intended to be an insult or a compliment. From then on, the contradictions grow. The mood is flat. The banter is wack. The first in what will surely be several spinoffs in the Fast and Furious universe is already, within minutes, a throwaway.

Goddammit.

I am the first person to argue for more Fast and Furious movies, and I’ve frequently put my reputation on the line to do so: at parties, during job interviews, in the waiting room of my gynecologist’s office. I’m basically always talking about Fast and Furious, even when I’m not supposed to be. What I would not give for another Fast Five, Tokyo Drift, or even 2 Fast 2 Furious; to have Brian O’Conner and Han Lue brought back to life (again); to return to L.A. once and for all; to share one more Corona around the table and raise a toast to family, like we all really mean it, just like we used to. I’d love to see Dom Toretto force some punk through a glass wall, Letty drive some punk off a cliff, Tej crack some code, Roman crack some joke, or hear Mia say something completely benign and forgettable throughout it all. But no—instead, we get the two characters least representative of the Fast and Furious ethos (which is, of course, “WE ARE FAMILY”) alternating between almost punching and almost kissing each other for two hours and sixteen minutes. Who asked for this? Hint: Their names rhyme with The Lock and Mason Nathan and they are both executive producers on the film.

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So what happens in this two-hour-plus romantic romp? Here’s the rundown: Idris Elba is Brixton Lore, a superhuman robot soldier who is—what else?—trying to eradicate the planet of weak humans in order to create a superhuman race of, I dunno, superhumans. He intends to do that by spreading a virus that turns your insides to jelly in under 48 hours. But, he is foiled when—who else?—a woman, willing to be the martyr in this whole pistol measuring contest, injects herself with the deadly virus to keep it out of Lore’s hands. She prays and hopes that someone, anyone will save her from having her sexy girly parts liquified—and quick.

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Lucky for Hattie Shaw (played by Vanessa Kirby), she has both a brother in Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), and a romantic interest in Luke Hobbs, and they’ll stop at nothing to protect her. She may be a skilled, intelligent, exceptionally competent MI6 agent but feminine weakness being what it is, she cannot possibly pull this off alone. She is also weirdly barefoot for much of the movie, and while Hobbs and Shaw are lit from within and full of vim and vigor throughout most of their skirmishes, Hattie’s cat-eye makeup looks like it was applied by a literal cat. As Hobbs and Shaw attempt to take down Lore’s nefarious plan and save Hattie from imminent death, the duo also manage to destroy a double-decker bus, several glass-walled rooms, a secret lair the size of the UN building, the coastline of Samoa, and an abandoned nuclear power plant that is—if we’ve learned anything about subtlety in the F&F universe—probably meant to be Chernobyl. They also make ample time for love-hate, buddy-comedy banter that never seems to end. And you want to know the worst part? There is hardly even the whiff of a car chase until roughly 45 minutes in.

The movie is full of ridiculous, random cameos. I was just as surprised to see Rob Delaney standing next to Statham as I was when I learned that Ryan Reynolds is actually kind of funny. Despite being a far more talented actor than Statham and Johnson, the beautiful Idris Elba is limited to robotic lines and stiff movement, proving that the egos of our heroic male co-stars are far more delicate than we originally thought.

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But you wouldn’t need a villain sapped of charisma to figure that out: Vin Diesel, the godfather of the Fast and Furious movies, is nowhere to be found in this film. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a surprise, but Diesel has been in all but one Fast and Furious movie so far, including right at the end of Tokyo Drift in a surprising and delightful cameo. Rumors of male fragility on set of the ninth installment are all but confirmed with the sheer existence of Hobbs & Shaw. They may as well have called it Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw & NOT Dom. The other male characters in the film are foils that reinforce Hobbs and Shaw’s toughness: Reynolds plays a bumbling idiot who is in love with Hobbs, Shaw beats up Delaney’s character and still doesn’t even remember he exists, and Kevin Hart practically begs to join in on their dynamic partnership. He is denied repeatedly. Hobbs and Shaw are the alpha males of this universe, so much so that Hattie, who is literally dying from a virus, is forced to yell at the two as they squabble like babies: “I don’t have time for your alpha male shit right now!” Vanessa Kirby is basically the only good thing about this entire mess.

I won’t give away the ending because I bet you can already guess what happens, but suffice it to say that The Rock delivers the following line as if his Oscar is depending on it: “Brother, you may believe in machines, but we believe in people.” We are all praying for release. As the sky clears, our villain now extinguished, poor Hattie ends up squashed between her brother and her lover as they almost begin fighting again. She wills them, with whatever energy is left within her after confronting death, to stop. The film ends. Someone seated in your row will turn to you and say, “I liked it!” and you will briefly wonder why you married them. There is simply no accounting for taste.

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For a Fast and Furious purist, Hobbs & Shaw is just one more perversion closer to the inevitable end of the franchise’s long reign, not with a candy-ass bang but a candy-ass whimper. And just in time, as you could probably expect, for the long-awaited, first female-centric spinoff to arrive in the not-so-distant future. The biggest flaw in Hobbs & Shaw’s makeup is not its absolute lack of logic, the improbability of its stunts, the self-seriousness of its characters, the ridiculousness of its one-liners, nor the near-absence of any female agency—those are all the characteristics that make the Fast and Furious movies so beloved. It’s that someone is getting away with the lie that the Fast and Furious movies can ever be about the heroics of just two people, instead of an entire team of wily rejects, criminals, hackers, car thieves, and one loving patriarch to bind them all together. After all, there’s no “me” in Fast and Furious—but there is an “us.”

I’ll leave you with this nugget of wisdom, delivered by Luke Hobbs to his daughter Sam, in a moment of paternal bonding: “In life, things happen. You may not want them to. But they do.” If you swap out the word “life” for “Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw,” hand me a needle. I have a pillow I’d like to embroider.

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Correction: Although 2 Fast 2 Furious used archival footage of Vin Diesel, he was not featured in the movie, making Hobbs & Shaw the second movie without him. The article has been amended.

Dayna Evans is a writer and devoted Fast and Furious scholar based in New York.

‘Hobbs and Shaw’ Writer Chris Morgan Reveals What Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham Wanted in the Script [Interview]

Chris Morgan has written every single Fast and Furious movie since 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and he’s back as a writer/producer of the franchise’s first spin-off, Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw. But while Morgan had previously written all of his entries solo, this time he has a co-writer in the form of Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation).

In a phone interview conducted earlier this week, I spoke with Morgan about how his working relationship with Pearce, the scenes stars Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham wanted to see in the script, the inspirations for writing this film, taking this franchise into full-on James Bond territory with the villain plot, and more.

Hobbs and Shaw Interview: Chris Morgan

When I spoke with you for The Fate of the Furious, we were talking about how Vin Diesel is such a big collaborator of yours and is a key part of the development process for the Fast and Furious movies. He did not act in or produce Hobbs and Shaw, so was he involved in any of the story conversations about this spin-off?

No, I think they were so focused on [Fast] 9, which was developing at the same time, they had their hands full with that and we had their hands full with this. Fortunately, I have an excellent collaborator in Dwayne Johnson as well. Let me back it up a little bit. When we did Fast 8, remember the sequence in the prison and we played Dwayne and Jason against each other and they went to town on each other throwing insults?

Yes.

That’s the moment that we knew – and the studio knew, specifically – that if we ever wanted to expand the Fast universe, it’s probably with those two guys. They just had a great engine. They respect each other, but man, they hate each other. The characters, that is. One of the things about the Fast films is that they’re always very, very large ensemble pieces, which is awesome, but doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to kinda dig down into characters about where they come from, what are the things that haunt them, what are the things that ground them and make them real sorts of people? Parental troubles, sibling rivalries, all that kind of stuff. So when we fastened in to do this, we really decided to dig in on where does Hobbs come from? Who is his family? Where does Shaw come from? What are his issues with his family? Who are the new characters we haven’t met yet? We got to just dream and play and have fun with these characters who we’ve been living with for a lot of years and then make it personal as well. Specifically for Dwayne, just to be able to bring his Samoan heritage into the film and into such a big, global picture, was really fun.

I’m curious about writing a script for big alpha actors like Johnson and Statham. What sort of stipulations did you get from them or their people when writing this movie? Did they want equal screen time, or was there anything like that which you sort of had to write around when crafting this screenplay?

No, not really. It’s Hobbs and Shaw: you naturally want to balance that screen time just from a story sense anyway. But no, nobody’s counting lines or anything like that. It’s characters that they both love to play, and again, they love to get over on each other. It’s just knowing that we’re going to feed into that with action sequences and fights and some personal – the things that they ask for, generally, are, ‘Can we have a touching moment with my daughter? Can we dig into my family history?’ Those are the things they want to safeguard, and look, they know that we’ve got them handled on all the action front.

To me, this movie is essentially a modern-day remake of Tango and Cash. Was that film a touchstone for you when you set out to write this movie?

(laughs) It is, I love Tango and Cash. Absolutely. That and Butch and Sundance and Lethal Weapon and 48 Hrs. Yeah, all of those are touchstones.

Did you study Tango and Cash structurally?

(laughs) When I was younger! In the theater, a bunch of times. For sure.

How did you approach this from a writing standpoint? As the first spin-off of the franchise, how important was it to step out into new territory while trying to retain a sense that this is an adventure that’s taking place in a world we already know?

Yeah, it’s a balancing act, right? It’s Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, so you want to make sure that people who love Fast and Furious understand that this does take place in the universe of Fast, in our timeline. The repercussions of this adventure will kind of ring out down the road through Fast. Part of the reason the studio really wanted me on producing and writing and all that was to guarantee that: that Fast feel, that Fast tone. But then also to lend it its own flavor as well so you recognize there’s something slightly different and special in these spin-offs. Largely, it’s the fact that A), we get to dig a little deeper on our characters and their backgrounds, but B) the comedy. For this particular film, there’s a little bit more comedy just because of the energy between Dwayne and Jason. Specifically Hobbs and Shaw, but also Dwayne and Jason, you know?

So yeah, I think as a fan of Fast and someone who’s been involved for a while, I just want to make sure that we are delivering on the same Fast level in terms of the heart, the action, the accepting inclusiveness, globe-trotting. David Leitch came in and he’d just done Deadpool 2 and Atomic Blonde, and his sense is very pop and very fun. He’s a really funny guy, so he just got to ‘plus’ all of those comedic scenes.

This is the first time you have a co-writing credit on one of these films. Did you and Drew Pearce write together, or did he come on board and do a separate pass later? How did that writing relationship work?

It’s great. We were doing it together. Basically what happened was, as we were getting right into production, I’m producing it as well as writing it, and there’s a lot of – we basically just needed extra hands. David had worked with Drew previously, and we came in and got along great, and we just divvied up scenes, divvied up work, and he’d do a pass and I’d come over and vice versa. A positive benefit of that as well is that he’s actually from the UK, so he got to bring some really fun dialogue for the Shaw family that felt a little more authentic.

You mentioned the globe-trotting action earlier. This franchise has been compared to the Bond movies in terms of its scope, but a secret organization that wants to commit genocide in order to replace human weaknesses with mechanical perfection is the most Bond villain plot this franchise has ever seen. What was the thinking behind going that far with the Eteon organization?

Well, in terms of the Bond level of it, I’ll start from the beginning. We have Hobbs and Shaw, who are like these alpha tough guys. We’ve seen them clear a room of bad guys and they’re not daunted by anything. We needed something to actually stand in their way, be so formidable, to beat them down so badly, that these two guys who definitely don’t want to work together – and though they respect each other, they probably hate each other – the only way for them to possibly even try to solve the problem of the movie is to work together to beat Brixton, Idris Elba, in our film.

The reason for the genre shift a little bit – and we’ve done it before also, with Fast Five going into the heist genre – I was just doing a bunch of research on super soldiers and DARPA and future military tech, what they’re working on, where they think they’re going to get. We just decided to give some of those attributes to Brixton to make him incredibly formidable. Also, there’s a little bit of a theme in there of ‘heart vs. tech,’ kind of an old school sort of thing. It turns out that he works for an organization and they’re up to nefarious things. We’re not even sure exactly all the stuff that they’re up to, in terms of the audience, yet. It just seemed like it was fun. It’s a footstep into a slightly different genre, but not too far. It’s five minutes in the future in terms of the actual tech that Brixton is wielding, like the autonomous bike that he has.

Speaking of old school, I have to ask you about Han. He’s not mentioned in this movie, but last time we spoke, you said that you’d been thinking a lot about that character. If Han were to come back in a future Fast movie, would it have to be in flashback form? Or would you entertain the idea that he somehow escaped that explosion in Tokyo?

OK, so there’s a lot of questions in there. Let me start with, there’s a line in this movie from Shaw, right before the ancient weapons battle in Samoa where he’s talking to Hattie and he says, ‘There’s things that I’ve done and there’s things that I have to make amends for.’ That, specifically, he’s referring to Han there. That’s why I wrote it that way.

In terms of Han, I think Han and Shaw – Shaw is going to have one of the greatest arcs of the Fast franchise. It is something that we’ve been talking so long and so much about that we want to be able to devote enough time to it to make it really land. But his is an arc of redemption, of regret. You should just know, in terms of Justice for Han, nobody feels the need for that more than us. Especially Sung Kang as a friend, and we altered the entire timeline of the Fast universe to preserve for three additional movies. Believe me, we are the biggest fans, and I want to make sure that his stuff is resolved really well. I’m just going to just leave the other question in terms of flashback or bringing him back – let’s just see how that story lays out.

Fair enough. I was wondering if Han’s ghost haunted you as you’re writing lines for Deckard Shaw, a character who killed him and got away with it?

It does. Honestly, it does. Han is one of my favorite characters. He started my Fast journey with me in terms of the character and also Sung, you know? That character has been a constant for me, one of my very favorite characters, and someone that I think about often, and exactly how we lay out whatever we reveal in the future with him.

At one point, Shaw points to a Mini Cooper and talks about a “job over in Italy.” Did Deckard Shaw change his name and operate as Handsome Rob from The Italian Job for a while?

I’m just going to leave that there. (laughs) You know what it is? Who knows, but what I will say, I remember we were kitting out Deckard’s lair, and we were looking at the cars. There’s a lot of McLarens, all British cars, and then we were just like, ‘Oh my God, we have to put a Mini Cooper. We have to.’ And they were like, ‘Really?’ and we said, ‘Yes, yes, we must.’ So thank you for noticing that. It’s funny because I love that film and I’m a big fan of it. Who knows what Deckard Shaw has been up to?

Are you going to write Fast 10?

We’ll have to see. Would I? I would, for sure.

What’s the latest on Crime of the Century?

Oh my God, you and me both. I’ve been talking to [director] Dan [Trachtenberg]. Things are in the works. I would just say, just be patient. That’s such an amazing project.

We know it’s a time travel heist film, but can you tell me what’s being heisted? What’s the score that the protagonists are going after?

You know what, I’m going to leave that to Dan, because it’s so personal for him. I don’t want to reveal that for him. I’ll give him the choice on that.

***

Hobbs and Shaw is in theaters now.

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