I saw someone else weighed in, but I’ll go ahead and post a review anyway.
We can argue all you want about whether the Fast and Furious series really deserves to have 8 films, whether that series has gone over the edge by pitting a handful of cars and trucks against a nuclear submarine, etc, etc, but the truth remains, people love those movies. Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is probably not going to be added to the list of favorites, and dear God I hope it doesn’t get 7 more sequels.
Hobbs & Shaw finds the two titular anti-heroes (Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham) from the F&F universe called up by their respective nations to hunt down an MI-6 agent (Vanessa Kirby) who has stolen a deadly mutating virus capable of killing all human life on the planet. Surprise twist, the agent is Shaw’s sister, and of course she’s been framed for the theft by the villain (Idris Elba) who is part of a secret cabal bent on forcing human evolution through technology and AI. Hobbs and the two Shaws don’t really like each other, but they team up to beat the bad guys, travel the world, blow shit up, and eventually become best buddies.
Hobbs & Shaw is a purely unnecessary movie. I don’t know that anyone was clamoring for this team up, and it doesn’t really deliver on whatever amount of personal chemistry helped make the F&F movies a fan favorite. This isn’t Johnson’s or Statham’s best performance. The action is over the top as you would expect, but it just doesn’t feel particularly F&F. The plot is a formulaic stereotypical buddy-cop type of movie where the heroes don’t like each other at first, but develop a grudging mutual respect over the movie, and find out in the end that they’re stronger as a team than as individuals. Lots of it feels forced, including a plot thread about Hobbs returning to Samoa to reunite with his estranged family.
There are lots of other small problems with the movie that all add up to a fairly mediocre thrill ride. For example, Statham and Kirby are supposedly brother and sister, and they’re shown in flashback playing as kids, relatively close in age. However, Statham is in his 50s and Kirby is 31, and it’s not like the two look similar in age. Elba is ok as the bad guy, but he’s got a Transformers style motorcycle that just doesn’t fit in the F&F universe. There’s a scene where a bunch of Samoan brothers are connecting their cars together to weigh down a helicopter (don’t ask), and it’s almost comically stupidly fake,…even by F&F standards.
Overall, if you’re looking for big explosions, fight scenes, bad guys vs good guys, etc, and don’t really care if the movie is very good, Hobbs & Shaw is probably an ok way to spend a Saturday afternoon. However, if you’re looking for more F&F, this isn’t it. And if you’re looking for a really good action movie, this isn’t really that either.
There’s a lot of violence, and some foul language, although not much explicit gore and no sexual content. Probably ok to wait for this to come to Netflix.