'Hobbs & Shaw' Trailer Reveals Idris Elba's Villain Has Superpowers

For years now the Fast & Furious franchise has been careening away from street racing culture and [...]

For years now the Fast & Furious franchise has been careening away from street racing culture and towards becoming a full-on superhero series - and now the franchise's new spinoff film Hobbs & Shaw is officially taking things there.

The first Hobbs & Shaw trailer opens by introducing us to Idris Elba's villain character, Brixton, who apparently is some kind of "superhuman" terrorist. We see Brixton in a high-tech lab, where mechanical arms are going projecting what looks like digital coding over different parts of his scarred body, while also activating some kind of electrical system within his skeletal structure. Throughout all that sci-fi showcasing of shirtless Idris Elba, we get this comic book villain voiceover from Brixton:

"I'm dealing with the future of the planet. I'm the necessary shock to the system. I a human evolutionary change. Bulletproof. Superhuman."

Granted, this is dialogue likely cut together from different scenes in the film, but the trailer uses it to illustrate one clear point: Hobbs & Shaw is taking things to a whole other level than the Fast & Furious movies did!

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has been hinting in recent interviews that Hobbs & Shaw would be taking the action quotient of the series to a new playing field. It seems to be part of a (healthy?) competition between Johnson's Hobbs & Shaw brand and Vin Diesel's Fast & Furious series, following a very public fall out between the two mega-stars, during the previous film, Fast of the Furious.

As stated, the franchise has been leaning further and further into superhero territory since director Justin Lin introduced The Rock's Luke Hobbs character in Fast Five. From cars dragging bank vaults, to the endless runaway assault on Owen Shaw's plane, to Dom Teretto catching Letty out of mid-air during a massive collision... It's probably long overdue that someone just outright started dropping words like "superhuman."

For Johnson, this is pretty much a backdoor way for him to get the G.I. Joe franchise he always wanted. Thankfully, Idris Elba is the kind of actor who can not only make such pulpy silliness seem menacingly convincing, but also make it look good. Brixton seems more badass than Hobbs and Shaw combined, which is pretty much the kind of testosterone overload you need for a film like this. Someone owes us a beer if Hobbs and/or Shaw also end up being 'enhanced humans' by the end of this film...

With Hobbs & Shaw showing no shame about staking out its claim as a full-on superhero genre competitor, it will be interesting to see how Fast & Furious 9 takes shape.

Hobbs & Shaw has wrapped production. It hits theaters on July 26th. Fast & Furious 9 starts production in a few weeks, and is slated for released on April 10th, 2020.

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