Review

Dwayne Johnson and Jason Stathom reprise their roles as Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw who are two guys who don’t get along at all. They are forced to work together when Hobb’s friend Locke, hilariously played by Ryan Reynolds, informs Hobbs about a cyborg-like threat played by Idris Elba.

The leads dislike and animosity towards each other is consistently comedic. Hobbs pokes fun at what he calls Shaw’s Harry Potter accent and Shaw makes fun of the Rock’s face.

The production and special effects are mostly top notch. Everything is shot and color corrected beautifully. However, there is an embarrassingly huge continuity error where the scene changes from night to day time instantly.

There’s so many unimaginable moments where characters lives are at risk and it just takes me out of the story when these characters choose to say something snappy and quippy in the midst of danger.

Idris Elba’s villain is a cliche antagonist whose ludacris motive makes no sense. He literally introduces himself as the “bad guy” and wants to wipe out our characters for no believable reason. While he’s literally referred to as the Terminator, he lacks depth that the Terminator from T2 actually did have.

The final act is long drawn out and could’ve easily ended at an earlier point in the film. There’s two encounters the heroes have with the antagonist and the only reason the screenplay called for that second encounter was to beef up the villain and add a ton of Hobb’s family members that were easily forgettable. Had the film tweaked a few things about the plot and wrapped up at the first encounter this easily could have been 1 hour and 45 minutes. Instead we have to sit for 2 hours and 15 minutes.

There’s some decent action scenes; my favorite involving the characters going down a very tall building. However, there’s nothing like John Wick that’s truly unique or jaw-dropping.

There’s plots relating to Hobb’s daughter and a romance he has with Vanessa Kirby’s character that don’t truly get a satisfying conclusion.