It's a bit of a victory lap for The Rock and Jason Statham, who have emerged as perhaps the most likable performers in the Fast & Furious franchise and have the star power to really sell a spin-off like this.
Sure, the trailer gives away way too much -- but boy does this movie look fun in a check your brain at the entrance kind of way. And it has a killer last shot in which The Rock appears to be swinging a helicopter with his bare hands. Those kinds of moments are crucial to selling movies like these.
There was something about watching this trailer that reminded me of when I was a kid and summer movie season was the most exciting time of the year. Yes, there were always the family films, which eventually became the tentpole Pixar movies, but there were also high concept action spectacles with big stars and bravura sequences.
But, for the last few years, there haven't been many traditional summer movies for me to get excited about. Part of this is me just getting older. Maybe I'm no longer the target audience for a movie like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and I know I'm not for Detective Pikachu, but with the biggest movies of the year opening earlier and earlier these days, the drought of good until we reach the awards season deep into the winter feels longer than ever.
Yes, superhero movies still deliver this time of year. The early buzz on Spider-Man: Far From Home is good, and that does feel like an old school summer blockbuster. Last year it was Mission: Impossible - Fallout filled that void for me. But this year, movies like Men In Black: International, Dark Phoenix and at least critically if not commercially, Aladdin, have all been duds.
The movie most deserving of a summer movie reception, Booksmart, was a massive bomb at the box office, for reasons I still can't fully understand.
It may be sequel fatigue, especially when they're ones that no one domestically was clamoring for. But that fact is that with a couple of exceptions (like Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and Inception) almost every summer of the last 10 years has been dominated by sequels or films based on established source material, usually comic books or animated titles.
There are two non-traditional summer films that I am as excited about at the blockbusters that I used to rush out to as a kid: Midsommar, director Ari Aster's follow-up to Hereditary and Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Midsommar, is already divisive with critics, and may be (like Hereditary) too heady to win over a mainstream audience, but Tarantino's ninth film is another story. It's got huge stars, an intriguing Charles Manson adjacent hook and the Tarantino brand, which still gets audiences out most of the time.
There have been a few buzzy, zeitgeisty movies this year -- I would argue that Us and John Wick 3 qualify. Endgame does too I suppose, although it almost felt like something you had to see to be a completist, even though it was better than it needed to be.
Midsommar and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood could be the popular, widely discussed and debated, kind of breakout summer movie that I've always loved. My fingers are crossed.
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