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This “Fast & Furious” spinoff featuring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham veers awfully close to rom-com territory.
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‘Hobbs & Shaw’ | Anatomy of a Scene
The director David Leitch narrates a sequence from “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw,” featuring Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham.
Hi, my name is David Leitch. I’m the director of ‘Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs & Shaw.’ So the goal here was to really define these characters quickly for the audience. A lot of people know Hobbs and Shaw from the previous “Fast” films, but I wanted to do something really specific. So you can see, using this split screen technique, we got to have these fun vignettes with the characters obviously demonstrating Shaw being more precise and more methodical and Hobbs just being a rough and tumble, get-it-done kind of guy. You know, the idea that they’re different but they’re the same was sort of the subliminal message I was trying to get. So to achieve that, I worked with cinematographer Jonathan Sela and David Scheunemann in production design to create these sets that were perfect in size and focal lengths that were exactly the same. “Where?” So we could create this, and it was sort of a painstaking process, even to that drone shot that you see, the top shots of the cars. Like, we really were particular in how we measured focal lengths to make this happen. The use of color was really specific as well, especially in the beginning of the montage, you see defining Hobbs’s world as a little bit more warm, a little more jovial, a little bit more human I guess and maybe making Shaw’s a little bit more standoffish and sterile and cold. The visual nature, again, going back to this sort of very graphic composition that is telling us that these guys are the same, ultimately they just have different ways of achieving their goal. We thought it’d be really interesting if we could not only do something graphically, but then the first time we hear them speak, they have these sort of iconic, classic, action star catchphrases. “Who the hell are you?” “Oh, I’m what you call a nice, cold can of whoop ass.” It sort of demonstrates how alike they are but again, how different they are. “Who the hell are you?” “I’m what you might call a champagne problem.” We made sure we defined their fighting styles very precisely and made sure those fighting styles define their characters. So Shaw is obviously more of a technician, more of a refined martial artist. So we got to have some fun with some found objects in the champagne bottle. You look at Hobbs’ side, he’s using found objects as well, but it’s in a very different way. He’s taking that tray and just smashing guys over the head with it. And it is sort of indicative of who these guys are as characters, and we wanted to make it happen as quickly as possible to get into the movie. “Would have thought that would have broke.”
By Wesley Morris
- Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
- Directed by David Leitch
- Action, Adventure
- PG-13
- 2h 15m
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 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.
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The filmmakers so want to maintain the joshing between Johnson and Statham that the movie’s ostensible action label and the lust Shaw fears Hobbs has for his sister feel like pretexts for the romantic comedy “Hobbs & Shaw” virtually is. Idris Elba plays the movie’s biomechanically enhanced supervillain, and not that far into things, he wonders aloud who’s going to stop him. So, for an answer, there’s a cut to a split screen of Johnson and Statham in their respective beds. Each is going about his day — waking up, eating, exercising, taking phone calls simultaneously with the exact same response. “Jinx!” I thought to myself.
With the screen split, their bald heads — Johnson’s is smooth, Statham’s stubbled — are often inches from each other. And over the course of the movie, the tension between these two has so escalated amid the downpour of virility that by the time they’re on a plane arguing, again, over the sister (“I’m gonna let her climb this mountain. Over. And over”) those bald heads are all but knocking into each other. I was torn. Was the right response, “Get a room” or “Here’s a scrotum”?
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