Last week, a large portion of The Verge team went to see Hobbs & Shaw, the ridiculous new Fast & Furious spinoff. Most of this website’s staff has a frankly bizarre amount of love for this series, and having never seen any of the films, I’ve always been a little puzzled by it. But I guess Hobbs & Shaw just about explains everything.
Hobbs & Shaw is a great example of how a movie can get in on the joke and use that to its advantage. The characters are all big, broad, over-the-top caricatures, the plot is so basic as to be inane, and the film will happily do whatever it needs to do in order to land a joke, a punch, or an explosion in a car chase, even if it means making the bare minimum amount of sense.
But in boiling everything down to…