LIFE
18 | Thursday, August 22, 2019
CHINA DAILY | CHINADAILY.COM.CN/LIFESpinoff sees Rock change track
Hollywood A-lister teams up with fellow Fast and Furious star for new franchise, Xu Haoyu reports.
A
fter the eighth install-
ment of the Fast and the
Furious franchise raked
in 1.3 billion yuan ($
million) at the Chinese box office in
just three days last year, Universal
Pictures decided to launch a spinoff
to tap into the original series’ runa-
way success.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs &
Shaw centers around the duo of
Luke Hobbs, an agent of the US
Diplomatic Security Service
(Dwayne Johnson), and Deckard
Shaw, a former elite British military
operative (Jason Statham), and the
one thing they have in common:
family.
In the film, the quarreling two are
forced to team up to stop terrorist
Brixton (Idris Elba) from gaining
control of a biological weapon that
could change the fate of humanity
and rescue Shaw’s sister (Vanessa
Kirby), an MI6 agent who had to
inject herself with the virus during
a special mission.
Hobbs and Shaw have been try-
ing to take each other down with
verbal insults and body blows ever
since they first met in the seventh
Fast and Furious outing.
“You know we hated each other,”
Johnson jokes at a news conference
in Beijing.
“Still do,” retorts Statham.
The British action star says much
of the on-screen chemistry between
Hobbs and Shaw derives from how
each of the characters sees himself
as being much better than the oth-
er.
“Deckard Shaw thinks Hobbs is a
bit of a slob. He’s big and slow, and
he dresses bad. He’s like the oppo-
site of how Deckard Shaw sees him-
self. They see each other as
something that they don’t want to
be,” Statham says.
Chris Morgan, who has been
involved in the production of Fast
and Furious series since the third
installment, is again the scriptwrit-
er for the film.
He wrote the story about Hobbs
and Shaw out of his love for the two
characters, and with a renewed
desire to explore their backgrounds
more deeply.
Morgan adds that since Fast Five,
he and Johnson have been talking
about how to expand the Fast and
Furious franchise, and how to
embody the image of the characters
through storytelling.
“We have been daydreaming
about what the other adventures
might be, where Hobbs comes
from, what things haunted him in
the past, where we want him to go,
and what kind of trials he might
face,” says Morgan.
Director David Leitch reveals
that both Johnson and Statham
played an active part in developing
their own roles. And the effort
Johnson put in this film didn’t stop
just there: the Hollywood superstar
even named one of his dogs after
his character.
“In Hollywood, you usually play a
character once. But from Fast Five
to eight (The Fate of the Furious), I
have already played Hobbs four
times,” says Johnson. “It’s a charac-
ter that I love playing, and it’s justso much fun. He doesn’t have any
superpowers, he doesn’t talk like a
superhero — but he’s doing things
like one. It’s my great honor to play
him, and I’ve had a lot of great rela-
tionships coming out of my experi-
ence with Fast and Furious.”
For this film, Johnson has man-
aged to shape the role with his per-
sonal cultural background.
The location of the final battle is
set in Samoa, an island in the south-
ern Pacific Ocean where his mother
was born. Johnson himself was
born in California but grew up in
Hawaii.
This prompted him to cast many
of his Polynesian friends in the film,
including his cousin, Roman
Reigns, a famous World Wrestling
Entertainment star and a friend of
Johnson since his wrestling days.
Johnson reveals that Reigns was
battling leukemia during the shoot,
but he still came to the set in Kauai,
Hawaii, and completed his first film
surrounded by family and friends.
“We are all inspired by Reigns’
strength, and luckily, he is currently
recovering and back in the WWE,
kicking ass,” Johnson says, smiling.
Morgan describes a story hedeveloped for the movie based on a
true Johnson family story. In one
scene, when Hobbs discovers he
only has garden tools — a hoe and a
pickax — to use as weapons at his
home, his mother tells him to forget
about guns and fight like a real
man. The scene was actually based
on a real life conversation that
Johnson’s grandmother had with
his father decades previously. The
moment Morgan heard the story,
he knew he had to put it in film.
“I would say that Johnson and
frankly all of us have been very col-
laborative over the years and have
been active in shaping the charac-
ter Hobbs in every single scene. The
best idea always wins with all of us,”
Morgan says.
While the villains in the Fast and
Furious films are always dramatic,
the villain introduced in the spinoff
is perhaps the baddest of them all.
Leitch says it was very hard to
find a villain that could stand up to
Hobbs and Shaw physically, so he
created a gene-enhanced bad guy.
“Brixton’s not the Terminator, but
he has been applied with the next
level of human augmentation and
prosthetics. It’s a cutting-edge,futuristic scenario,” he says.
Brixton is eventually beaten by
the combined will and strength of
Hobbs and Shaw.
“In the islands, we have a word
called ‘mama’, which means spirit. I
wanted to deliver something differ-
ent to the audience that shows you
can overcome challenges, not with
weapons, not with technology, but
with ‘mama’,” says Johnson. “It was
the first time that we had the
opportunity to explore Samoan cul-
ture and present it to the world.”
Surprisingly, actors Ryan Reyn-
olds and Kevin Hart joined the cast
in supporting roles. In the movie,
the Deadpool star jokes about Game
of Thrones and adds some pop cul-
ture references into the mix.
And for Chinese audiences, there
could be an even bigger surprise in
store with the sequel.
Johnson reveals that while Chi-
nese actor Wu Jing couldn’t take
part in Hobbs and Shaw due to a
scheduling conflict, he is destined
to “absolutely” show up in the
sequel to the spinoff.
Statham also voices his respect
for Chinese action stars.
“In Hollywood, people can easilyput someone’s face on a stuntman,
and make anybody into an action
star with computer-generated
imagery and face-replacement
techniques. It’s very easy to make
anybody look good. So for my entire
career, my whole inspiration has
only been through people like
Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Lee and
Donnie Yen. These are the people
that really inspire me, because they
are authentic.”
Already released in countries like
the United States, Australia and
France, the movie had banked $
million at the worldwide box office
by Monday.
With a 67 percent rating on US
movie review site Rotten Tomatoes,
Ty Burr from the Boston Globe also
praises the spinoff: “All the films in
this franchise are family affairs, but
you may find yourself wanting to
spend more time on this branch of
the tree.”
Justin Chang from the Los Ange-
les Times comments: “For better or
worse, these are digitally souped-up
blockbusters that haven’t entirely
lost touch with their humanity,
even if Hobbs and Shaw, diverting
as much of it is, could have used less
snark and more soul.”
For Joe Morgenstern from the
Wall Street Journal, the set pieces
are strong: “The action is impress-
ive and the stars are personally as
well as gladiatorially appealing, but
the filmmakers seem to have shot
the treatment instead of the script,
or never bothered with a script.”
But with the summer season in
full swing, perhaps Michael O’Sulli-
van from the Washington Post best
sums up the movie’s appeal. “The
film is far from prestige fare, yet
more often than not, it hits that
summer sweet spot between the sil-
ly and the satisfying.”
The film is due to be released in
cinemas across China on Friday.Contact the writer at
[email protected]A still image
from Fast &
Furious
Presents: Hobbs
and Shaw
shows Luke
Hobbs (left,
played by
Dwayne John-
son) and Deck-
ard Shaw (right,
played by Jason
Statham) facing
off against the
film’s villain
Brixton (center,
played by Idris
Elba).
PHOTOS PROVIDED TO
CHINA DAILYChina, this is for sure,” Durakovic
says, adding that he was fascinated,
when he visited China in May, by
how much Chinese know about Sar-
ajevo, the movie and the interest it
has generated among the Chinese
public.“There are many middle-aged vis-
itors from China who visit the
museum, but there is also a growing
number of young Chinese who are
visiting with their families and chil-
dren,” Durakovic adds, recalling one
particular tour group that arrived atthe museum earlier this month
where all the visitors were under 30
years old.
Durakovic thinks that the young-
er generations have probably found
out about the movie from older
members of their families, and themuseum, with its interactive ele-
ments, such as wax figures, scenog-
raphy from the film, music and
multimedia exhibits, is interesting
for younger visitors.
“When Chinese tourists come to
visit the museum, they are enchant-Sarajevo film museum proves popular with Chinese tourists
SARAJEVO — A museum based
on the cult movie Valter (Walter)
Defends Sarajevo has become a
favorite meeting point and educa-
tional space for Chinese tourists
visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bos-
nia and Herzegovina, according to
the museum’s director, Jasmin Dur-
akovic.
Since its opening on April 6 this
year, the museum, which commem-
orates the cinematic story of Vlad-
imir Peric Valter, a famous member
of the Movement of Resistance and
anti-fascist figure from World War
II, has welcomed a total of 15,
visitors, a third of whom were Chi-
nese tourists.
Durakovic explains that around
5,000 Chinese visited the museum
during the first four months of its
“test phase”.
He says it is the first museum in
the Balkan region dedicated to the
cult movie, directed by one of Bos-
nia and Herzegovina’s greatest film-
makers, Hajrudin Siba Krvavac.
“Valter Defends Sarajevo is our
country’s most famous export to
ed by it,” Durakovic says, “They are
among our favorite guests.”
Aside from the main protagonist
of the story, the character of Valter,
who is a hero for them, the second
thing that Chinese visitors are most
enamored of is the movie’s music.
Also, they are apparently keen to
know how many of the exhibits are
original objects from the film, and
they ask about the usage of specific
items, about the set and the studio,
he says.
Chinese tourists are also interest-
ed in visiting and touring around
the older parts of Sarajevo, such as
the Yellow Fortress and sites around
the old Sarajevo Clock Tower — all
areas where the movie was filmed —
according to Durakovic.
He adds that the museum is cur-
rently working to create wax figures
depicting characters from another
popular movie, The Bridge. A song
from the movie, Ciao Bella, is,
according to Durakovic, “extremely
popular in China”.XINHUALeft: A museum based on the movie Valter Defends Sarajevo has become a popular destination for Chinese tourists after it opened on April 6.
Right: Visitors to the museum on its first day included the wife of the film’s director Hajrudin Siba Krvavac. PHOTOS BY XINHUALeft: Dwayne Johnson speaks at a news conference in Beijing on Aug 6. Center: Lead actors Dwayne Johnson (left) and Jason Statham
appear at the same event. Right: The Chinese poster of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw.