Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw

Strangely, Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw's best moments have little to do with either Dwayne Johnson or Jason Statham. Although the couple's bickering helped prop up the series' first post-Paul Walker instalment, the recriminations struggle to engage when scaled up to power an entire film. Part of the problem is the lack of venom, the insults flying back-and-forth between Johnson and Statham just aren't mean enough. The jibes momentarily amuse but are, ultimately, forgettable. There's very little sense the two action stars are actually trying to upset each other or leave a permanent, brand altering read in the audience's mind. The Rock cuts his usual promos, telling you how great he is, while Statham babbles around, threatening to grumble his way towards the effing-and-jeffing seen in Spy. He never quite gets there.

Pinned up in a garage, and glimpsed towards the end of Hobbs & Shaw, is the poster for Walter Hill's 48 Hrs, the high water mark for squabbling, buddy-buddy action films. I have no idea why you'd invite such a withering comparison. Neither star is as funny as Nick Nolte, never mind Eddie Murphy. Mechanically, Hobbs & Shaw reaches for comedy as a salve, a way to force scenes through the exposition and down-time notes that basic plotting requires they hit. Since the two top-billed stars are to be protected from real, lingering abuse, ringers are drafted to soak up the punishment: Kevin Hart and Ryan Reynolds are parachuted in to churn through their usual shtick, here interpreted as creepy hero worship of The Rock and his throbbing musculature.

These massive, punishing cameos recall the distended bloat felt in Sammo Hung's 1980s action comedies, proving once again that Hong Kong was way ahead of the curve when it came to populist garbage. What the film does have though are Vanessa Kirby as Statham's little SIS Hattie and Idris Elba as a fascist, cyborg Superman named Brixton Lore. Hattie is relentlessly imperilled and pumped full of the apocalypse drugs that every party is champing at the bit for. Happily, the character isn't then relegated to a passive possession to be fought over. In terms of genuine physicality, Hattie is actually the highlight. Kirby and her stunt doubles Lucy Cork, Elizabeth Donker Curtius and Laura Swift combine to deliver a tucked, tumbling performance that peaks with a delirious skip across shipping containers while a Soviet era power station collapses around everyone's ears.

As well as the usual swaggering machismo from the permanently brilliant Elba, the actor also provides a focus point in the film's most impossible special effects sequences. Brixton, working for tech-focused doomsday preppers, is the human component for a mutating murder-cycle that can twist and turn around Lore's body, squeezing the augmented man through a variety of shrinking, otherwise calamitous, gaps. Although completely out of place in a franchise about drag racing, Corona chugging chodes, Brixton and his super-duper-bike do neatly combine the thrill felt when viewing the incomparable opening credits of TV's Street Hawk with a Japanese, piloted mech aesthetic. You now, the clanking cauldron that birthed, and later bled into, the Transformers toyline. Since Hasbro's film series is still actively avoiding this kind of biomechanical symbioses, Hobbs & Shaw's human missile will have to do.

The Expendables 2

I was quite fond of The Expendables. Sylvester Stallone's 80s action mega-mix neatly juggled a reductive police action plot, with some gonzo character moments. Each actor appeared to be playing an amped up version of themselves: Stallone was codgery but desperate to please; Statham, unlucky in love with beautiful brunettes; Jet Li working overtime to support two families; Stone Cold Steve Austin quite happy to strike a woman. It was a film with a pro-wrestling mindset, turning up personality tics and tricks against a backdrop of Commie stomping and big government mistrust. All that and Sly seemed to have spent hours cruising YouTube for bite sized attention grabbers to co-opt for the big screen. Expendables was a piece engaged with the type of viewer who delights at record breaking pistol reloads, or seeing an American twenty-somethings - who are pretending to be Russian - chopping up the landscape with their latest combat shotgun. It was crass and shallow, but betrayed a slathering, uncompromising affection for also-ran 80s thugs and their modern equivalents.

The Expendables 2 takes a different tact, perhaps trying to recontextualise the sappy, barely reconstructed personas that Sly and the gang struggled with during the early 1990s. Stallone's doomed relationship with a perky surrogate son pokes at the same mutant identity areas as the last film, but the execution is clumsy. The film plays like a TV movie, with a plot better suited to a modern-day A-Team pilot than an all-in genre stomp. Director Simon West lets the Planet Hollywood trifecta burn screen time cracking gentle jokes in static set-ups whilst Jason Statham is relegated to one tiny feature thump - a knife ninja remix of Clint Eastwood's entrance in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.

The rest of the original cast get it worse. The wonderful Terry Crews is made to play second-fiddle (in the realm of enormous firearms) to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Li bails out after the first mission. Lundgren is a mere background player here, doomed to blow kisses at Stallone's future squeeze Yu Nan. The underdog charm of the first film is jettisoned then in favour of (fading) A-list indifference. It's fun to see Schwarzenegger marching forwards firing a Call of Duty gun without blinking, but it's a fleeting joy. The only person really trying is Jean-Claude Van Damme. His character, Jean Vilain, seems to be the only role still operating on the first film's private-life-as-action-reality premise. His sinewy, euro-trash arrogance perfectly suited to make adversarial moves against Stallone's dull macho internalism. For all its faults Expendables 2 is one of the few films that really taps into Van Damme's dickish, sport shagger appeal. If we are to suffer an Expendables 3, Stallone would be well advised to seek assistance from some of the behind-the-scenes stars of 80s action cinema. I'm sure Steven E de Souza could knock up a suitably hyperbolic script for jailbird John McTiernan to direct.

Also Van Damme

Sylvester Stallone hands stewardship duties on The Expendables over to Simon West, a former Jerry Bruckheimer stable shooter who peaked with 1997's endlessly rewatchable Con Air. I've never felt like Mr West got his due for Con Air. The film is routinely heaped in with Michael Bay's usual one-note action sludge, despite having a sly self-awareness, and operating sense of humour. It resembles Bayhem, that's undeniable, but it has an ironic streak that'd have Michael scrunching his face up in confusion. Also Van Damme.

The Expendables

Sylvester Stallone speaks directly to lower brain functions. The director-actor understands that an action movie can have an outline rather than a plot; that how you dress this frame can more than compensate for a lack of any so-called higher artistic aspirations. Basically, The Expendables is your standard buddy black op. An elite pack of psychopaths must unlawfully invade a Latin American country suffering under a crackpot dictatorship and tear everything apart. For spice, the weak-piss Generalissimo is backed by ex-CIA heavies, with abilities that mirror our heroes, looking for somewhere tropical to get their coca crop grown. Continuing the body horror thread that the director hit upon in 2008's Rambo, Stallone's Expendables is dressed with traumatic ultra-violence. The film often most concerned with how easily a human body can be pulverised until it resembles nothing at all. 

Accordingly, each of the mission men is assigned a ruinous, comic book superpower: Stallone is a quick-hand pistolero; Jason Statham a shuriken sniper; Jet Li a wushu bushwhacker; Randy Couture is a tumbling MMA bone snapper. Terry Crews becomes an instant action icon thanks to a spot demoing the latest in combat shotgun technology from Military Police Systems Inc. Crews' performance as Hale Caesar plays like an embedded teaser trailer for a one-man army franchise that audiences are sure to demand. Unusually, nobody is marginalised. Everybody gets their moment and an admiring close-up. Stallone shoots deep-focus faces, daring you to stare at the canyons and crevices lived into these frowned up fizzogs. Stallone's eye is loving and sympathetic, particularly when regarding the brooding confusion of Dolph Lundgren's Gunner, a satellite crew member who gets a meta-textual encore. Sylvester Stallone, an actor's director? Who knew?

Crank: High Voltage

As much as Crank: High Voltage hates minorities, women, and homosexuals, you can be sure it hates leading man Chev Chelios that little bit more. Jason Statham returns as the track-suited impulse puppet, once again coerced into acting like a rampaging video game character. As usual, it's his ticker, or lack thereof, that is to blame. The adrenaline pumped stallion heart that saw him through the first film has become a hot commodity with ailing Triad bosses, leaving Chelios organ farmed and lumbered with a bum artificial replacement. Fucks sake! If Chelios doesn't keep his new mecha-heart juiced with ever intensifying electric shocks, it's game over.

High Voltage ditches the meth house glam of the previous film. For the sequel, characters are caked in a sweaty, shimmering, seventies sheen. Everything is lurid and grimy. If Grand Theft Auto piss-abouts were the original Crank's inspiration, then High Voltage is knee-deep in Japanese trash cinema. As the film rolls on, Statham's sprinting feats become explicitly superhuman, the frenetic edit collapsing into the kind of lumbering stop motion that recalls Shinya Tsukamoto's cyberpunk classic Tetsuo. There's a meat-headed man-in-suit power-up that brings to mind War of the Gargantuas via Electric Dragon 80.000V; you even get a sprinkle of Takashi Miike in how the last act prioritises some head-punting irreverence. High Voltage eventually winds down having covered a lot of the same ground is its predecessor. Can the bad taste superman survive sequel fatigue? Statham closes the flick as an abused action figure, all singed hair and indistinct features, but raring to go. What he really needs now is a rival.

Crank 2: "Fuck that!"

Did you catch the Crank 2: High Voltage red band (sweary, sleazy) trailer that did the rounds last week? Dreadfully sorry, had meant to link. If you're lucky, you might find a snatch of it on youtube, but vids are being pulled at an alarming rate by grumpy studio Lionsgate. Down with free publicity! So, what's Stephen King's favourite wideboy shitkicker up to in this wildly improbable sequel? Looks like Statham is in the clutches of nefarious Chinese organ harvesters, who have designs on his penis! Fucks sake! Armed with an experi-mental clockwork heart, Statham must twat about town, upstaging the previous film for gross indecency. It's a tough call, but I think he can do it!

It's heartening to see Statham back at the forefront of tasteless cheapy action narratives. My last brush with the baldy high-kicker was the neutered, flustered Transporter 3. PG-13 Statham is practically an oxymoron.

I really should get cracking on my Statham super-script: Fucka. Fucka sees Statham defending his pub from terrorists, and what-not, armed with only a sock full of snooker balls. I'll post some extracts soon!