WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, in theaters now.
The Fast & The Furious movies are inherently ridiculous. Even the original film, an extended early 2000's riff on Point Break with racing instead of surfing, is pretty over the top. But as the series has continued, it's become progressively sillier and more absurd. This has all been to its benefit, helping turn the series from increasingly repetitive car footage into the kind of bombastic and fun action films that just aren't made in an era dominated by superhero movies.
Hobbs & Shaw, the first official spin-off of the franchise, embraces that idea more than any previous film in the series. Hobbs & Shaw is a truly bonkers film, with heroes holding back helicopters and villains with transforming motorcycles. If Hobbs & Shaw is willing to throw caution to the wind and center it's narrative around two men fighting a cybernetically-enhanced ex-MI6 agent for the fate of a programmable super-virus, what can the core Fast & Furious franchise do to keep up?
Big & Loud
The first three films in the F&F franchise were more interested in the street racing narrative than anything else. Even Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew more interested in the rush than the actual stealing, which was mainly an end to pay for the aforementioned racing. The third film, Tokyo Drift, even left behind all of the established stakes and characters to instead focus on the underground driving culture of Japan instead. The following film in the franchise, Fast & Furious, was a success, however, bringing back the original cast and leaning more into overt action tropes.
This would become the norm with Fast Five, which introduced Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) as the new agent of the law trying to bring down Toretto and his crew. This is the film where Toretto and his gang steal a bank vault and drive it around a major metropolitan city, causing massive damage with along the way. Subsequent films have included scenes where cars drop out of airplanes onto mountain roads, amnesic ex-partners who become minions for the villains, fights with tools that play out like sword duels. By the eighth film in the series, Fate of the Furious, there's a scene where the cars are all chased across a frozen ocean by a submarine.
The F&F movies have gotten more aware and know what kind of action they feature, but they've also maintained a semblance of a connection to reality. The importance of "family" grounds many of the characters, and their familial relationships take the forefront at times over any action or potential fight scene. That's not the case with Hobbs & Shaw, which finds a way to blend the family bonding more tightly into the action sequences.
Left In The Dust
All of those action movie tropes that those films embraced pale in comparison to Hobbs & Shaw, however. Hobbs & Shaw includes only a handful of scenes where driving is crucial to the narrative. Even in those moments, the cars aren't the focus. It's the spectacle happening around them (such as an imploding power plant or chase through the busy London streets) that draws attention. There's no real tie to reality, save for the characters at the core of the film. But Hobbs and Shaw basically operate as superheroes throughout the film. At one point, Hobbs even holds back a helicopter with a chain and his bare hands. There have been some superhuman moments in the past F&F films, but never to this degree of absurdity.
On a whole, Hobbs & Shaw is even more delightfully over the top than the pretty bombastic Fate of the Furious. It knows what kind of tone it's aiming for, and it easily imbues the narrative with as many absurd stunts as possible. This means extended battle sequences between Shaw (Jason Statham) and a group of ten men, a scene where Hobbs Mario-jumps on top of people to reach Brixton (Idris Elba) and the entirety of the Samoa segment. Embracing that bombast makes Hobbs & Shaw an incredibly entertaining (and self-aware) ride, which is something the F&F movies are going to have to try to match if they want to stay on top of its own spin-offs.
Send Toretto To Space
It's been a long-running theory that the F&F films will eventually make their way to space. The final frontier is held up as both the logical place for the elevating action to head, and it's indicative of the tone of the series. Why not send Toretto and his crew to space? It's even been mentioned as a possibility by series writer Chris Morgan.
It's the kind of move Universal needs to add to the next film in the mainline F&F series. The studio needs to prove that the core movies are just as able and willing to entertain as Hobbs & Shaw was. A lot of that came from going as big humanly possible. If F&F doesn't want to be left behind by the giant spectacle of Hobbs & Shaw, they're going to need to go just as big and just as fast.
Directed by David Leitch (Deadpool 2) from a script by longtime Fast & Furious narrative architect Chris Morgan, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw stars Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba and Vanessa Kirby.