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.

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom (2013)

There aren’t many people who have lived a life as interesting and inspiring as Nelson Mandela. The man who fought to dismantle apartheid – the deeply unfair, institutionalised system of racial discrimination in South Africa – has a story well worth telling. Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom makes a halfway decent attempt at doing so, quite effectively capturing the transcendent effect Mandela had on politics the world over. But, as a film, it’s a tougher pill to swallow. Its pacing is slow and the narrative drags at times, giving the impression that the movie has run out of story. And yet, it barely digs beneath the surface of the man and his politics.

We first meet Mandela (Idris Elba) as a child, growing up poor but surrounded by rich traditions in a rural village. Over the course of the next few decades, he becomes a lawyer, then a revolutionary, a political prisoner, and the first democratically-elected president of South Africa. Along the way, he sacrifices any sort of personal pleasure: he drifts away from his second wife Winnie (Naomie Harris) during his long incarceration, and doesn’t get to watch his daughters grow up. By the time he meets his children again, he is more symbol than person: an idea rather than an actuality.

Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom is a competent, if not particularly stirring, biopic. It covers all the major milestones of Mandela’s life: his pro bono work as a lawyer; his first encounter with the young, beautiful Winnie; the rough and tumble protests that consign him to 27 long years in prison. In broad strokes, it paints an impression of a difficult life well-lived, as Mandela goes from persona non grata to undeniable political force: the one person that the despairing white politicians end up going to for advice.

But, for all that it serves as a good primer for people unfamiliar with Mandela’s history and politics, there’s not all that much of the man himself in Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. His plight, his achievements and his struggles are dutifully checked off a list but there’s precious little sense of the troubles and triumphs that he no doubt experienced within himself. His prison-bound evolution from radical revolutionary to someone staunchly committed to peace and non-violence is left, frustratingly, opaque. The narrative, too, moves almost painfully slowly over a hefty 147-minute running time, plodding when it should race and soar.

Elba – in heavy make-up which ensures that he looks nothing like Mandela or himself – plays the part calmly and evenly, a stately presence lending a quiet power to the film around him. Harris is quite riveting as Winnie, whose estranging transformation into a hard-line political zealot is possibly the more intriguing one in the film. In Harris’ gritty, wild-eyed performance, there’s a sense of the mother driven to the edge of reason by the ordeals she suffers: a less praiseworthy, but perhaps more understandable, reaction to the political forces that have robbed her of her rights and freedom.

To be honest, it does feel rather churlish to think badly of Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom. It’s hard to criticise the man and his legacy, and certainly the film builds up a strong case for the political revolution that sprang up around him. But there’s no doubt that Mandela deserves something as lively and impassioned as his agenda: not a biopic that feels like it was plucked from a brief, occasionally perfunctory, textbook about his life. 

Basically: An ordinary biopic of an extraordinary man.

Pacific Rim (2013)

It isn’t often that one walks away from a summer blockbuster promising epic clashes between robots and alien sea monsters with an appreciation of the texture of its plot and the depth of its characters. But that’s exactly what happens with Guillermo del Toro’s quite wonderful Pacific Rim, a film that seems tailor-made for fourteen-year-old boys but is deserving of a far larger audience. It’s not exactly perfect (few films are), but it is a close-to-sublime blend of action, humour, and genuine human drama, all underscored by one of the most fully conceptualised, intelligent sci-fi premises in ages.

Set in a futuristic world where an unfortunate rift in the Pacific allows giant alien monsters (a.k.a. kaiju) to rise against us from the sea, mankind’s first and only line of defence are the Jaegers – enormous robots so huge and complex that they must be operated by a pair of co-pilots working completely in sync. But, as the battles between monsters and robots drag on for years with no sign of ending, the Jaeger programme begins to fall out of favour with the world’s political leaders. Soon, only a handful of veterans and Jaeger-faithful remain, functioning on ever-dwindling resources. In the face of an impending apocalypse, former Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) is recalled into service and teamed with untested trainee Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) to drive an almost obsolete Jaeger from the past.

The most surprising – and welcome – twist to Pacific Rim is that its plot is very far from the rudimentary affair you might expect. Instead of a narrative hastily patched together to serve as a perfunctory backdrop for epic robots-versus-aliens smackdowns, an enormous amount of thought has clearly gone into the creation of this broken, hurting universe. Within the film’s first ten minutes, del Toro creates a deep, complex history and backstory for a world devastated by kaiju attacks, artfully positing an alternate reality in which the best Jaeger pilots become instant celebrities and kaiju parts sell like hotcakes in the black market.

Even more delightfully, del Toro lavishes great care and attention upon the people – yes, people, and not merely characters – who populate his world. Raleigh and Mako both bear the literal and figurative scars of their earlier run-ins with the kaiju, and del Toro handles them and their growing relationship with admirable sensitivity. As the two trade memories and build trust, the link they forge – and the final scene they share – is so tender, rich and atypical of conventional summer blockbusters that it’s enough to make one cheer at the memory of it.

This level of character development is extended to the other characters making up this unexpectedly human ensemble drama. Elba’s Stacker Pentecost can lay claim to both the film’s most famous one-liner (“Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse!”), as well as its emotional core: severe, deadpan and noble all at once, his connection with Mako is responsible for much of Pacific Rim‘s emotional punch.

Even the supporting characters flung into the mix for additional drama and/or comic relief are fleshed out in a way most of us have been geared not to expect from movies of this sort. With minimal sentiment and cliché, del Toro ensures that audiences will be invested not just in the fates of the central triumverate of Raleigh, Mako and Stacker, but also in those of father-son Jaeger team Herc (Max Martini) and Chuck Hansen (Robert Kazinsky) and bickering science bros Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman).

Added to Pacific Rim‘s surprising depths of emotion are the hallmarks of del Toro’s filmography to date: an almost obsessive focus on production design, and bursts of joyful, sardonic and occasionally macabre humour. In other words, this film looks incredible and makes you laugh at the most unexpected moments. del Toro has spoken of how he’s planned every scene down to the colours and what they signify in each individual frame, and it shows. Similarly, he threads great jokes and one-liners into his film in a way that’s audaciously, perfectly fitting for blockbusters of this sort – something more earnest films like Man Of Steel, for example, forget to do (to their detriment). This combination of lush, beautifully realised fantasy and dark, dark humour are personified in Hannibal Chau, an outrageously loud and funny black-market peddler of kaiju innards played by del Toro muse Ron Perlman.

Ironically, it’s the action in this action blockbuster – the high-intensity clash between metal and monster – that falls somewhat short. There is one absolutely cracking battle between kaiju and Jaeger in which downtown Hong Kong serves as the unfortunate casualty – it’s a sprawling, extended sequence that masterfully mixes in laughs, threads in characters and demolishes entire buildings, packing in references to all the old Japanese kaiju movies that so inspired del Toro as a child. But the rest of the battles aren’t filmed in a particularly distinctive way: instead, they’re confusing rather than exhilarating, soaked in rain or ocean waves, and go on for just a bit too long than strictly necessary. Coming as it does after the Hong Kong set-piece, the final showdown feels repetitive and rather anti-climactic, allowing audience members to pick over holes in the plot and logic if they so wish. (Why in god’s name do all the politicians in the world think their alternative to the Jaeger programme is better and more likely to save the world?!)

Pacific Rim comes crashing into cinemas under the weight of a certain set of expectations. Happily, it circumvents almost every single one of them, producing what is possibly the most intimate and personal summer blockbuster ever made. Radiating with del Toro’s passion for his subjects (giant robots, giant monsters), it also has a huge amount of love for the human beings who furnish it with its huge, beating heart.

Basically: The most human, heartfelt creature feature / summer blockbuster you’ll see this summer.