Idris Elba’s superpowers in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw may be able to explain the franchise’s most insane and improbable action scenes. Although the franchise started out with street car racing, Fast & Furious quickly evolved into something much bigger. The nights of drag racing were traded in for international espionage missions that put the fate of the world in the hands of the ride-or-die crew.
As ridiculous as the franchise has become, the announcement that Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham would star in a spinoff film made many wonder if it could return the series to a more grounded take, while still retaining the action-heavy elements fans have now come to expect. However, the first trailer for Hobbs & Shaw showed that this is definitely not the case. The footage shows more of the same outlandish action set pieces, with a car doing barrel rolls as it leaps from building to building. But Hobbs & Shaw is also taking this universe a step further thanks to the introduction of Idris Elba’s character Brixton - a superhuman villain.
At first glance, what Brixton is able to do in Hobbs & Shaw feels a bit out of place, even for this franchise. He says he is the future of the planet, explaining that he is bulletproof, superhuman, and the bad guy. Brixton has a major scar on his back, and the operation that took place appears to have given him super strength, possibly even by making him partially robotic. With the added bonus of super strength, Brixton is a certified killing machine who is nearly indestructible. While all of the details about Brixton’s abilities are not yet known, they could help make sense of Fast & Furious’ most over-the-top elements.
The franchise has previously tried to retroactively explain some of its wilder elements, but this hasn’t completely worked. For instance, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) appeared to have died in Fast & Furious by a gunshot, but then Fast & Furious 6 revealed that she is alive. Her attempted killer shot her car to make it blow up, with the explosion blasting her off the road she was laying on. She survived but completely lost her memory. Now that Brixton has given the franchise superpeople and possible cybernetic enhancements, this could actually be a completely different Letty. At the very least, it could be explained that the only way to save her life was by giving her similar enhancements and she just doesn’t know it yet.
It wouldn’t be too big of a leap to make either, and giving these enhancements to other characters could be needed. In fact, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is best positioned to be another superhuman and very well could be in the plans now. Fans have already theorized that he’s actually a Terminator due to how indestructible he is, so could Dom unknowingly be superhuman too? This could explain how he was able to make a leap across a highway, lift a car by himself, or even bring down an entire parking garage just by stomping his foot.
Making everyone superhuman would be a step too far for the franchise, but a few changes like these wouldn’t hurt. The abilities of Idris Elba’s Hobbs & Shaw opens up the door for the franchise to fix some of these issues, if they actually want to try and explain away what has happened in past films. These events and characters may arguably only become more ridiculous if it’s revealed that they are in some way superhuman, but at least then we’d have an actual explanation for how these otherwise ordinary people are able to pull off and survive these crazy feats. Now that Fast & Furious Present: Hobbs & Shaw has laid the groundwork, it will just be up to future installments of the main franchise to decide whether or not to take advantage.
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- Hobbs and Shaw Release Date: 2019-08-02 F9: The Fast Saga Release Date: 2021-06-25
