‘Hobbs & Shaw’ Review: Rock-em-Sock-em Bromance

This “Fast & Furious” spinoff featuring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham veers awfully close to rom-com territory.

The people who made “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” know that Dwayne Johnson (Luke Hobbs) and Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw) have an easy adversarial chemistry. They build the movie around their put-downs and pranks. Statham stays focused on how Johnson’s size makes him seem kind of dumb and unsubtle. And Johnson picks on what an indecipherably British hobbit Statham is. At some point, Hobbs gets a load of Shaw’s stable of sports cars and asks if he’s, uh, overcompensating.

Seems right for two people — an American agent and an English mercenary — who spent an exciting sequence at the top of the seventh “Fast & Furious” movie throwing each other through glass windows and designer office furniture. This spinoff is more of the same. But, written by Chris Morgan, who’s handled most of the “Fast & Furious” movies, and Drew Pearce, it weighs less and seems to know that, too. David Leitch directed it, and the fights and chases achieve a kind of smooth brutality that makes sense for the maker of “Atomic Blonde” and the second “Deadpool” and who had a hand in the first “John Wick.” It has a good hip-hop soundtrack and the sort of coherent editing that you need for something with this much juxtaposed bone-breaking. The weightlessness, however, extends to a plot that makes no sense, and involves an extinction-level virus that Shaw’s intelligence-agent sister, Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), has heroically injected into herself and that doesn’t at all diminish her agility, wit or capacity for flirtation.

https://youtu.be/HZ7PAyCDwEg