Tag Archives: The Fast and the Furious

Why You Shouldn’t Watch Hobbs and Shaw

hobbs-shaw-noWhile it doesn’t quite promise to sweep the box office like the franchise it spun off fromHobbs and Shaw is garnering a fair amount of excitement among demographics that want to see Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson do to a helicopter what Chris Evans already did in Captain America: Civil War back in 2016. Well, that and audiences that want to watch two of the biggest, burliest men in Hollywood punch a third big, burly man. That’s not to say that these are the reasons to give this action movie a pass (and in fact seem like strong arguments to actually go check it out).

As the marketing on some posters seeks to remind audiences, “This time there is no team.” In spite of the fact that Hobbs and Shaw is “presented” by Fast & Furious, Dominic Toretto and co. are nowhere to be seen. Not only is la familia absent, but this movie stars two of their former antagonists. Johnson plays the titular Luke Palagi Hobbs, a federal agent hellbent on taking them down in Fast Five, and Jason Statham is Deckard Shaw, an assassin-turned-mercenary who sought revenge on the team for putting his brother in a coma. That said, the general quality of villain-centric films isn’t the reason to skip this one, either (though Suicide Squad should have been enough of a deterrent on its own).

The reason not to watch Hobbs and Shaw takes place at the very end of Fast & Furious 6.

The answer to the question the title of this clip poses is answered by the very screenshot of the man walking with a phone held to his ear (written SPOILERS for the Fast & Furious franchise and others moving forward)

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Why The Fast and the Furious Franchise Has the Superior “Comic Book” Movie Shared Universe

This isn’t going to be the longest post for two reasons: 1) I made a bet with a friend and am only eating leaves for the entirety of today [this was my breakfast] and am therefore weak in mind, body, and spirit, and 2) this is a very straightforward assessment that two other other writers have already broken ground on already. Let me take a single step back, though, and remind you of what happens in a week’s time and why I’m writing this.

Furious 7 comes out.

I know I used my love of comic books to springboard my post on Flash Boys, the novel Aaron Sorkin refuses to write a screenplay for because “there aren’t any Asian movie stars”, but here we are again. Well, sort of. See, comic books only reach so large an audience. Comic book movies, on the other hand? They find themselves as two out of the top five highest grossing movies of last year [four of the top ten]. Everyone wants to get in on that business, to the point where a shared universe of larger-than-life characters was one of the goals of the truly awful Dracula Untold. Here’s the thing Universal, you already own The Fast and Furious [referred to as FF from this point on] franchise which has been going hard since the early aughts.

Remember at the end of Iron Man when Tony Stark meets Nick Fury for the first time and your nerdy friend gripped your arm so hard you thought they would snap it and whispered directly into your ear that “it’s happening“? The FF movies have been pulling that same move for years without the help of a narrative that’s been ongoing since the 60s. Every one of their reveals is builds on the preceding films,and the fact that they’ve managed to make this viewer drop his jaw is worth mentioning in and of itself.

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