Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)

The Low-Down: Sometimes, you build a cinematic universe by design (hopefully). Other times, you build it almost by accident. When The Fast And The Furious was released way back in 2001, no one could have foreseen it spawning a box-office-busting franchise that has since raked in more than $5 billion over eight films. Deciding to create this spin-off focusing on two of the franchise’s newest and most charismatic additions – the titular Hobbs and Shaw – must have been a no-brainer. Unfortunately, this film feels like a literal no-brainer too, its weak, cluttered script mostly failing to support its inexplicably talented cast.

The Story: If you’ve never watched a single Fast & Furious film (like this reviewer), you won’t be too lost. It’s fairly easy to pick up the threads of the spiky rivalry between American federal agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and British assassin-with-a-past Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham). Their mutual loathing takes a back-seat when both men end up on the same mission: chasing down a potentially world-destroying super-virus embedded in Deckard’s sister, MI6 agent Hattie Shaw (Vanessa Kirby). Hot on their heels is the cybernetically enhanced Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), who’s hellbent on securing the super-virus for his sinister employers.

The Good: When deployed effectively, Johnson and Statham are marvels of charisma and comic timing – well able to steal scenes, if not entire films, with snappy, snarky ease. On occasion, their electric charm and chemistry flare to life during Hobbs & Shaw, but it doesn’t happen often enough to save the film from its weak script and haphazard editing. That said, there’s some joy to be had in watching Hobbs & Shaw’s outrageously good supporting cast, which includes top-notch character actors like Helen Mirren and Eddie Marsan. Elba, for his part, acquits himself fairly well as a rampaging cyborg with a broken soul hidden somewhere beneath his menace and machinery.

The Not-So-Good: Unfortunately, the film never really lives up to the potential of its cast. The screenplay by Chris Morgan and Drew Pearce is frustratingly flabby. It’s the kind of script in which a strong female character is only as strong as the film needs her to be – Kirby tries her best, but is given next to nothing to flesh out the role of Hattie. Hobbs & Shaw also fails to help its titular double act move from the sidelines into the spotlight. Their incredibly juvenile playground bickering and bantering becomes wearisome after a while, making it harder to buy into the film’s attempts to delve into their histories and families. In grand Fast & Furious tradition, the action sequences are big and bonkers, bouncing from London to Moscow and even Samoa – but, shorn of effective character development, they also feel empty and soulless, strung together to pad out a running time that’s already far too long.

Lock It Down: If you’re familiar with Leitch’s recent filmography, you won’t be surprised by an extended cameo in Hobbs & Shaw that proves to be one of the film’s highlights. It’s the kind of blithely cheeky stuff that Leitch has proven he can pull off well – he juggled heart and humour to great effect in Deadpool 2. But Hobbs & Shaw never quite knows what it wants to be – silly or earnest, dumb or dark – and winds up being neither and nothing.

Recommended? Only if you’re a Fast & Furious devotee, or a diehard fan of Johnson and/or Statham. Otherwise, Hobbs & Shaw is a muddled mess that will sorely test your patience and tolerance for poorly-written, testosterone-fuelled shenanigans.

Filth (2013)

In almost every respect, Filth is a film that shouldn’t work at all. An adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s complicated, difficult novel laced with shades of psychosis and depravity? In the hands of a director who has only one other film under his belt? Featuring a central character who’s more monster than man, not so much demanding sympathy as being almost completely undeserving of it? Starring James McAvoy, a charming, nice-guy bloke of an actor who made his big-screen debut as a faun? No, it really shouldn’t work – and yet, it does, remarkably well.

Bruce Robertson (McAvoy) is a wretched beast of a man who lies, cheats, manipulates and fornicates his way through life. To snag a promotion to Detective Inspector in the Edinburgh police department, Bruce ruthlessly plays his colleagues off one another. But it soon becomes clear that his latest case – the gang murder of a Japanese student – is not the only thing unravelling around him. Bruce’s wife and child have left him, and it seems likely that his wits will soon follow suit.

By rights, there’s nothing particularly funny about Bruce’s predicament. Filth could easily have been presented as a bleak, cautionary drama about mental illness and sociopathy, asking questions about when a personality defect tips over into madness. It would be far more difficult to give full play to the blackest of black humour that suffuses Welsh’s novel.

And yet, writer-director Jon S. Baird’s decision to do just that is precisely why Filth works as well as it does. It’s not an easy or comfortable watch, and could prove utterly repulsive to some. But there’s something magnetically enchanting about the film as it zips by. In effect, it’s a live-action cartoon on steroids, chasing after Bruce as he bounces from reality into his drug-addled imagination and back again. Miraculously, Baird ensures that Filth never veers into the realm of camp. Instead, the entire experience is a perverse mix of charm and horror: you’ll find yourself almost ashamed to take delight in a film and character so unapologetically depraved.

The sheer electric power of McAvoy’s performance cannot be over-stated. Everything in the film sets Bruce up as that rare villain who becomes a leading man: he preys mercilessly on those more innocent than himself (including Jamie Bell’s awkward young detective and Eddie Marsan as Bruce’s hapless, self-termed best friend), and disdains those more competent or trying to help him (his main rival as played by Imogen Poots). McAvoy commits utterly fearlessly to Bruce’s villainy. It’s a revelation to see an actor known for his genial, everyman demeanour descend into such dark and sordid places.

But the true magic of McAvoy’s performance comes in the quieter moments, the handful of shuddering silences that pepper Bruce’s outbursts of action and manipulation. Therein, McAvoy unearths a fast-fading glimmer of humanity – not in any way enough to redeem Bruce, but essential to forming a more complete, tragic picture of the man who has lost himself beneath layers of monster and menace.

As a film, Filth asks a lot of its audience: trust in the crazy twists in its story, forbearance for its more morally repugnant characters and moments, faith in its ability to tie all the loose ends up in a way that doesn’t cheapen itself. Not everyone will think Baird has succeeded. Those who haven’t walked out by the end might be upset by the cheeky audacity of its final scene. But those who give themselves over to the streak of insanity – both literal and metaphorical – laced throughout Filth will be rewarded with one of the smartest, darkest and most intellectually beguiling films of the year.

Basically: A merry mix of murder, mayhem and madness. McAvoy is marvellous.

The World’s End (2013)

Seven years is a long time. It’s quite enough time for someone to develop the proverbial itch, wage a war, or grow old and jaded with life. Why, it’s possible even for a British comedian to go from nerd favourite (writing and starring in barmy genre-busting cult movies like Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz) to globally-recognised celebrity (helping to keep the universe safe in blockbuster franchises like Star Trek). In other words, fans have had to suffer a long, long wait for The World’s End, the leaner, meaner final installment of aforementioned British comedian Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s loosely-(un)connected ‘Cornetto Trilogy’.

Is it worth the wait? Unequivocally, yes. Pegg and Wright have always written their universes and characters with a mix of heady, nerdy joy – as if they can’t quite believe they’ve been allowed into the cinematic sandbox and are taking the opportunity to distill every ounce of their love, passion and (ir)reverence for movies into their work. That same crackle of creative chemistry sizzles throughout The World’s End. Next question: is it as good as Shaun and Hot Fuzz? On that count, the answer is a little fuzzier. This very British tale of an impending alien apocalypse is an altogether darker beast, operating on a rickety premise that becomes ever more evident with fewer laughs to cover it up.

Gary King (Pegg) is a forty-year-old man still trapped, rather tragically, in the memories of his halcyon youth. His best mates – Andy (Nick Frost), Oliver (Martin Freeman), Steven (Paddy Considine) and Peter (Eddie Marsan) – have all grown up and left their sleepy hometown of Newton Haven, some harbouring more emotional baggage towards Gary than others. Twenty years after their aborted attempt to complete the town’s legendary ‘Golden Mile’ (a pub crawl cycling through 12 pubs before fetching up in the titular World’s End), Gary brings the gang back together to try it again. As the quintet get progressively more drunk, long-buried resentments and rivalries come to the fore – even as it becomes clear that the inhabitants of Newton Haven are now stranger and more other-worldly than ever before.

The World’s End boasts much of the same cheeky, intelligent, subversive humour that made its predecessors such enormous cult hits. This is the kind of world in which characters confront alien robots while completely smashed off their faces, and Wright rightfully celebrates rather than downplays it. His sublime sense of the ridiculous allows the film’s more insane and surreal moments to play hilariously: whether it’s a bathroom pissing contest turned bloodbath, executed in shades of blue, or something as simple as King trying to vault a fence (a precious in-joke cultivated across the entire Trilogy).

But, in a rather fundamental way, The World’s End also feels completely different from the rest of the Cornetto Trilogy. It’s almost as if they traded in the seven-year gap between movies for a film that’s considerably more mature and darker in tone and message. It deals head-on with the very real losses that come with growing into adulthood – not just the disappearance of that blithe sense of abandon which allows five young men to embark on a liver-ruining pub crawl, but the genuine fraying of friendships, lost to time, misunderstanding and grown-up problems.

The film introduces its gang of five in a frenetic, exposition-heavy opening that soon gives way to its real focus: the ragged, broken relationship between Gary and Andy. In an interesting twist on the ‘bromance’ that has served so very well as the beating heart of both Shaun and Hot Fuzz, Andy is palpably furious and wants little to do with Gary, agreeing to join the pub crawl only after being emotionally manipulated into doing so. It’s not the sweetest of relationships, and certainly not a very healthy one.

Therein, some might say, lies the problem. There’s a brilliant, intense, uber-dark psychological drama about the deleterious effects of alcohol and one’s self and relationships lurking within The World’s End, all wrapped up in the form of Gary King. His problems are manifold and complex, stretching from alcoholism to self-delusion, with a huge, unhealthy serving of lying and manipulation on the side. Interestingly, and even admirably, neither Pegg nor Wright does anything to soften Gary as a character. There’s no twist to his lies, no suggestion that he’s anything but the jerk he is. Truthfully, he’s quite a piece of work.

To be fair, the sadness of a grown man, hopelessly lost in his long-faded glory days, is the entire point of the film, and it does make for some pretty fascinating character work and drama. But it does invariably drag The World’s End – and the audience’s spirits – down with it. Gary’s swimming in some pretty dire mental straits, and it becomes occasionally hard to enjoy the hijinks and comedy that surround him as he bodily drags himself – and his friends – through pub after pub. He is a very real, quiet tragedy unfolding throughout the film, even as snappy dialogue is reeled off and alien robots (as seen in the trailer) are despatched. This vein of dark, bitter human truth is what ultimately makes it hard to completely buy into the film’s wacky ending – in fact, it makes that ending feel cheap and silly, and not in a good way.

Pegg is astonishingly good in his portrayal of Gary as an oddly charismatic jumble of neuroses and bad intentions. With Gary’s almost manic grin stretched across Pegg’s far older face, it’s possible to wonder why anybody would want to spend any time with him – while understanding perfectly his perversely magnetic appeal. It’s enormously fun to get to see Frost playing less of a hopeless schlub this time round: as Andy, he not only puts a very human, grounded face on a man who has lived with Gary’s nonsense for countless years – he also gets to kick considerable butt against nemeses human and alien. The rest of the cast, featuring a regular roster of familiar faces and the beautiful Rosamund Pike as a love/hate interest, plays gamely along, knowing that this is really the Gary & Andy Show, but never letting that slip.

By anyone else’s standards, The World’s End is an accomplished brew of satire, spoof and buddy comedy, wrapped up in tropes about apocalyptic alien invasions of a planet Earth that can be saved only by drunken fools. It’s biting and often displays sparks of genius. But it’s also a far more broody, sullen, grown-up affair: one that comes close to being as depressing as it is entertaining. In the canon of Pegg and Wright, and as the capper to a sublime trilogy of films, it works very well – but perhaps not in quite the same effortless way as its two predecessors.

Basically: The mood piece of the Cornetto Trilogy: dark and fiercely funny, but almost too dark and fierce for its own good.