Though plenty of guns are used throughout the movie, the Fast & Furious franchise spin-off film Hobbs & Shaw is careful to stage a mostly gun-free final melee. It’s worked textually into the script—a hoped-for cache of guns has been given away at some unknown point in the past; the bad guys have their guns disabled by a clever hacker—and then the movie gets to clobbering the old-fashioned way, with brawn and blunt objects. Eventually a gun does reenter the picture, but it does not play a crucial role. Guns, Hobbs & Shaw seems to argue, aren’t necessary—a surprising and welcome bit of philosophy from this series, over a weekend that saw so much gun-related horror.
Of course, guns were necessary earlier in the film, but still, that the movie—a Universal release tethered to a series of films vital to the studio’s financial futures—makes even the most modest of deferential nods to the gun control cause is dimly heartening. Firearms-happy movies are not to blame for the recent spate of mass shootings in America, certainly, but they are perhaps reflective of a broad national ideology, one that locates coolness, independence, and might in the wielding of a gun. And even as stars have spoken out about the plague of gun violence gripping the country, they’ve done so as advocates for a medium that invented a whole discipline of choreography involving guns. Which, again, isn’t to place blame on movies for inciting violence, nor to divert energy away from enacting thorough gun control policies and combating burgeoning hate movements like white supremacy. The less urgent question for Hollywood is, I suppose, how much it wants to contribute to a culture it also so frequently denounces.
I thought about this while watching the recently released trailer for the Zombieland sequel, in which the passage of time and the development of maturity for two of its now-grown stars, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, is illustrated through their deft handling of firearms. Granted, these people have come of age in a zombie apocalypse, a reality that necessitates a familiarity with weaponry. But it’s an odd bit of optics for a comedy trailer right now, these two young people so happily loading and unloading their pistols in slow motion.
Yes, it’s just a movie, and nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times before—from The Matrix to a particularly jarring moment of gun celebration in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok. But decisions like this land more and more uneasily as time passes, as a sensitivity to real-world events clangs badly against the make-believe—the fantasy, even—of film. A gun tells a story easily and efficiently, so it’s a device filmmakers will no doubt be loath to give up entirely. I do wonder, though, if we could slowly move toward a time when our country’s gun worship isn’t given such a thorough laundering in movies, when the danger and consequence of a gun is fully felt on film—and is indeed the prop’s most potent aspect.
In Hobbs & Shaw, the villain is a bionic sort of rogue agent, enhanced with technology that makes him super strong and, at times, impervious to bullets. His unstoppability makes him, frankly, kind of boring. The movie seems to think the opposite—yet it does see the bland totalizing effect of guns; it knows that its final standoff would be quick, awful, and hideously decisive were machine guns and other ordnance employed. The movie gets things about half right, seeing not just the vague political advantage of a bullet-free climax, but the narrative benefits of it—the allowance of whatever the Fast & Furious franchise’s version of nuance is.
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