Hobbs & Shaw

Score:  D+

Directed by David Leitch
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Vanessa Kirby, Idris Elba
Running time: 135 minutes
Rated PG-13

Long Story Short:  Hobbs & Shaw brings the high adrenaline action of the Fast & Furious franchise, with the feuding couple of Johnson and Statham taking the original family's place.  If you've seen other F&F films before, you'll know what to expect - along with an extra, unpleasant dollop of the leads' out of control testosterone race.  Yeah, there are a few interesting stunts - but not nearly worth it for everything else you have to put up with.  Avoid.


When an MI6 task force attempts to secure a secret biological weapon of mass destruction, a terrorist group led by Brixton Lore (Elba) intervenes.  The task force's leader, Hattie Shaw (Kirby), is forced to inject herself with the dormant weapon and flee, but she is soon on the run not only from the terrorists but also her own leaders.  Longtime rivals Deckard Shaw (Statham), Hattie's brother, and Luke Hobbs (Johnson) are called in to find her; they both begin the search, but refuse to work together.  The clock is ticking, however, and soon the virus will kill its carrier - and likely unleash a plague on the world.

Hobbs & Shaw stars two of the newer and bigger, literally and figuratively, stars of the Fast & Furious franchise, along with several welcome additions.  Dwayne Johnson, as the unlikely global star emerged from a start as a pro wrestler, is the 1A lead of the film as Luke Hobbs.  While he has shown some considerable acting skill in other film roles, Johnson quickly falls back on the masculine posturing that can still trap him, a likely vestige of his wrestling days.  He is quite good at bringing the camera and audience's attention to himself, but here it's all testosterone-driven, which he tries and fails to offset with an occasional and awkwardly forced lighter side.  Statham, as Deckard, lacks the star wattage of his co-lead, but his character and performance are at least a bit more honest and consistent.  A gruff, self-absorbed criminal, he grudgingly works for the good - though only because his sister is in danger.  The film's ugly humor also therefore fits him more naturally.  Vanessa Kirby, off a nice supporting role in last summer's Mission Impossible, is the most interesting - when she gets the chance to be.  Mostly she's the damsel in distress (despite being a trained MI6 agent), but early in the film shows some fun spunk.  Idris Elba, a great actor and particularly in villainous or intimidating roles, is utterly wasted here.  He's about as physically imposing as possible (even referred to as "black Superman"), but his script is disappointingly bland and, frankly, so is his performance.

Hobbs & Shaw, while a spin off of the main Fast & Furious franchise, still retains most of its cousins' DNA - for good, but mostly for bad.  The biggest difference is in fact the most obvious one: most of the F&F team is on the sidelines here, with only relative newcomers Hobbs (joined in the fifth film) and Shaw (first starring in the seventh film) leading the way.  The plot is outright conventional action blockbuster, though the franchise overall has moved this direction, too.  Although the obvious reason for teaming up Johnson and Statham is to amp up the fight scenes, H&S still has several set pieces featuring vehicles.  As we've come to expect, these are over-the-top, to one degree or another.  The most ridiculous one, involving chaining cars together - while moving - to bring down a helicopter, produces the most delirious fun in the film.  Aside from it, despite boosting the intensity and stakes in just about every way possible, little else manages to achieve this one pleasure that you hope to get out of a F&F film.  Mostly, it's a failure of imagination.  Oh, a random virus that can kill every human on Earth?  Hmm, a broken man rebuilt into a nearly indestructible cyborg?  When everything is Extreme As Possible, it all loses its potency.  Then we get to the truly bad parts of F&F, which H&S carries on proudly (and/or obliviously).  No one goes to an action blockbuster for the writing, but these scripts are so bad they make my head hurt.  Only a cameo from Vin Diesel, delivering a choice line in his trademark horrible way, could have made it worse.  Along with the usual cringey, forced "all for family" schlock, H&S spends a lot of time on very unfamilial insult duels, racing each other to the lowest common denominator.  Here, "art" seems to imitate life, as Johnson and Statham apparently were concerned to a very, very sad level about how much they each got dissed and punched compared to the other.  The competition extends to their fictional sex lives as Statham, angry that his "sister" may take a liking to Johnson, gets Eiza Gonzalez to make out with him before disappearing again.  There is impressive stunt and effects work on display in H&S, and I don't want to dismiss their efforts - but when it comes to the guys on screen, yuck.

***

Hobbs & Shaw checks many of Hollywood's warning boxes, yet still suckered me to see it in the theater.  I've seen several of the other F&F movies before; what they've been able to boast in effects and stunt work has always been canceled out by mind-numbingly poor scripts and performances, even by action blockbuster standards.  Still, I thought H&S might finally be the one to acknowledge, if not fix, the past problems while keeping the fun parts.  Symbolically, Ryan Reynolds and Kevin Hart both show up in cameos (sorry to spoil - but hopefully you won't see this movie anyway).  At first, it was nice to see them.  Instead, both their presence and the film as a whole worsen the main problem at the franchise's core:  film as the most purely blunt weapon possible, bludgeoning its audience at every turn - from the silly action to the false family moments - telling, demanding you to accept what it wants (and fails) to be.  This will be the last Fast & Furious move I ever see - theater or otherwise.




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Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

Score:  B+

Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie
Running time: 161 minutes
Rated R

Long Story Short:  Quentin Tarantino takes audiences back to one of his beloved eras - in the world and on film - in late-60s LA.  Appropriately, contemporary superstars DiCaprio and Pitt lead the way in a movie focused on recreating the look, sound, and feel of the past.  Considering that the plot is secondary, it's a bit long, but there's still plenty of fun to be had in one of the auteur's most relaxed works yet.  A great way to spend a warm summer evening.


Los Angeles, 1969, is a city in transformation, with some old stars fading into obscurity and new ones just beginning their rise.  Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) is a long-time TV star, but has found himself resorting to one guest role after another.  He is followed in his set-hopping by old friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth (Pitt), once a star in his own right.  After meeting with a big time producer, Dalton sees one last opportunity to revive his dying career, though the habits he's fallen into over the years present formidable obstacles.  Meanwhile, Booth's encounters the city's growing population of hippies as he journeys through the city, at once fascinated and suspicious of them.  A sprawling place, LA still isn't big enough for the increasingly divergent cultures it contains, and a clash is inevitable.

Once Upon a Time... is anchored by two of Hollywood's biggest megastars, but has a lot of other familiar faces, too.  Leonardo DiCaprio, as the fictitious fading TV star Rick Dalton, produces a tremendous performance, the best in the film.  Most effective are the acute and diverse ways in which he shows Dalton's vulnerability and crisis of confidence; these range from subtle withdrawn postures to hilarious, full-on meltdowns.  Any positive trigger in his life brings out the old confident, even egotistical side - it's always lurking - but it's a ruthless time in LA for Dalton, and DiCaprio shows the turmoil it causes exquisitely.  Pitt is fun to watch as usual, too, but his "cool guy" routine is not appropriate for the role, in my opinion.  Whether it was intended to be that way, or Pitt just made it so, it doesn't quite add up.  It's hard to blame him, though, considering the overall vibe of the film, and he knows how to do it.  Margot Robbie portrays the famed Sharon Tate; although she gets quite a bit of screen time, she has very little dialogue.  It's primarily a visual role, something the gorgeous Robbie is well-suited for, though she also still does a good job conveying her character's care-free, innocent demeanor.  There's a dizzying number of cameo roles (portraying both real and fictitious people... it gets confusing), from Al Pacino to Lena Dunham, but the big three are the primary players.  Still, two supporting roles stand out: Julia Butters as Dalton's precocious young Method-actor (not actress) co-star, and Mike Moh in a brief but hilarious scene as Bruce Lee.

Once Upon A Time is one of Tarantino's most intimate and personal films, full of his trademark style but ultimately too indulgent to achieve greatness.  The setting - a blur of real and made-up LA and Hollywood from the late-60s - is another new one for Tarantino, but as usual it is guided by highly flawed yet intriguing individuals.  The narrative is of very little consequence here; Tarantino instead seeks to - and succeeds wildly - bring the audience into the scenery, from the eternally bright sunshine to the glorious classic rock to the vintage garb of the cool kids.  Unfortunately, two hours and forty minutes is rather long for such a meandering film, and Robbie's role (in addition to the foreboding of her very presence) is basically to give the film super-charged jolts of this style as interludes within Dalton and Booth's stories.  Easily fifteen minutes of this could have been cut out.  Still, Tarantino undeniably creates an absorbing, unique feel that is its own pleasure.  Despite being close partners, Dalton and Booth basically split off into separate adventures.  Thanks largely to DiCaprio's work, I found Dalton's professional struggles - from hilarious trailer meltdowns to clever exchanges with his young co-stars to his on-set failures and triumphs - more compelling.  But the film seems to favor Booth's, with its higher-stakes conflict and historical context.  It is also the one that leads directly to the film's conclusion; having resisted for almost two-and-a-half hours, Tarantino at last unleashes his typical, brutal violence.  While I liked that he once again inverted history for the audience's sadistic, vengeful pleasure, it was also not nearly as easy to fully surrender to it as in the slaughter of evil Nazis and slave owners in Basterds and Django.  A surprising yet somehow smooth end for the film, I walked out, like Dalton, satisfied if not unruffled.

***

While Once Upon a Time falls short (for me) of my favorite of the auteur's movies, it's still a high-quality and refreshing change of pace in the summer season.  Neither a sequel nor a reboot, this - like Tarantino's other films - stands by itself yet is out to entertain just as much as any blockbuster.  While the TV seasons have been thrown into disarray by streaming, the movie schedule has budged little.  It does make sense to have more big, popcorn action spectacles in the summer than in other seasons, but it's great to have a little variety, too.  Right now, only a handful of visionary filmmakers - Tarantino, Nolan, Scorcese, etc. - seem to get the resources required to reach a mass audience.  They are making not only the films we want to see today - mixed with the blockbusters and other genre standards - but also the ones likely to inspire the next generation's visionaries.  Be bold, Hollywood!  Highly recommend Once Upon a Time, but if you're sensitive to gore and violence, careful about the ending.




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