Okay, for real it's Hobbes and Shaw, but when I couldn't remember the name of the film that was my fallback position. I'd seen trailers and was pretty ambivalent about the project. My first comment was "I am obviously not cool enough to watch this picture". It was stuffed so full of toxic masculine energy that I started to wonder if this would be a send up maybe.
And in the end, the film itself was a little ambivalent. Over all, though, this was an above average loud dumb summer action film.
The cons:
There's a lot of male gaze, and despite the lampshade there's still a lot of 'boys will be boys' toxic masculinity. Sometimes people are Stupid For Plot or Stupid For The Funny. And they do that thing in chase scenes where everybody's going as fast as they possibly can and then one guy decides to just push the 'fasterer' button to speed up beyond maximum speed.
But our lead female actor has agency and competency, which I always appreciate, even if she is the MacGuffin. There were some really impressive set pieces (Like the escape from the Ukranian lab) and cool toys (Like the segmented motorbike omg). Idris Elba is good, but he's not putting anything special into this performance. Much like Rock and Statham. The soundtrack, despite not really being my thing, is very good at doing what it's supposed to be doing--telling you how to feel about the scene. In the end, the toxic masculinity is called out and proven to be a bad thing. Yay. Ryan Reynolds, who I didn't even know was tied to this project, was still almost the best part of the movie. And this film has the best case of Chekov's Mum I've ever seen.
All in all? Four wags out of five.
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