The Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw.
The latter was where the series also brought in its best villain in the cyber-genetically enhanced assassin Brixton Lore. Elba's campy, scenery-chewing performance made Brixton an unforgettable sleek-suited antagonist in a sleek suit for the two head-butting heroes of the spin-off. However, with Brixton's defeat and apparent death at the end of the movie, it seems as though the Fast and Furious movies killed their strongest villain too soon.
Or have they? Though Brixton seemingly falls to his death at the end of Hobbs and Shaw, the Fast and Furious movies have the benefit of being able to more or less make up their own rules as they go, and get away with it, in a way that most other film series simply don't. Here's what made Brixton the best villain of the Fast and Furious series, and how he could be brought back in time for Fast and Furious 10 or 11.
Brixton Lore Is The Most 'Fast And Furious' Villain Of All
The Fast and Furious franchise underwent what was, in hindsight, essentially a soft reboot with 2011's Hobbs and Shaw, Brixton Lore entered the game as the tech-enhanced top assassin of the shadowy Eteon organization. Under normal circumstances, bringing in a villain with digital radar that displays the trajectory of an opponent's incoming punch in slow-motion would seem like Jumping the Shark, but for Fast and Furious, semi-superheroic characters and scenarios are now the name of the game.
No other Fast and Furious villain has fit that bill better than the cybernetic Brixton Lore, and Idris Elba quite clearly had a blast chewing every inch of scenery in his immediate radius. In Brixton, Hobbs and Shaw had created what was, in essence, the personification of the gradual transformation of Fast and Furious from human to superhuman, and the perfect foil for the two heroes. Though the titular duo emerged triumphant by the end, considering just how strong a villain Brixton proved himself to be, it's arguable that Fast and Furious dispensed with him a bit too soon. Especially since the other Fast and Furious villains, with a handful of exceptions, haven't been as engaging.
Other Villains Haven't Hit The Same High Mark As Brixton
For as much of a monumental juggernaut as the Fast and Furious series has become, it has surprisingly few villains that have really left a major impact on the franchise. No antagonist in the first four movies has left much of a lasting memory, save for Furious 7 have wowed audiences in fight scenes, but they were still henchmen rather than lead villains.
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With Djimon Hounsou's Mose Jakanda being more of a terrorist Dom and his crew were sent to intercept in Furious 7, Deckard Shaw was the real antagonist of the movie, and by as the #JusticeForHan hashtag would indicate). By extension, the role Deckard's brother Owen played in rescuing Dom's infant son in the film all but wiped his villainy clean, too. That leaves Charlize Theron's Cipher from The Fate of the Furious and F9, and while a sadistic string-puller behind the scenes, she still wasn't as quintessentially Fast and Furious as the human-machine hybrid that Brixton was. It would seem that Hobbs and Shaw might have seen the best Fast and Furious villain as a one-off opponent for the two heroes and unwisely killed him off too soon. However, the Fast and Furious series still has a lot of wiggle room in this regard.
Could Brixton Lore Make A Return?
As to how Brixton could come back, an important thing to is that the Fast and Furious franchise is now all but completely divorced from street racing, and the series as the world currently knows it really began at Fast Five. At that point, the franchise was not only upping its stakes and the scale, but also shedding more and more of its concern for realism in favor of wowing audiences with things like Dom catching Letty in mid-air during Fast and Furious 6's highway chase or Hobbs surviving a four-story fall with only a broken arm in Furious 7. Resurrecting seemingly dead characters is also something the series is also already diving into with Han's return in F9.
With Brixton being such a sci-fi-based character, his return might not even require the series to jump through as many hoops as it normally would in bringing a seemingly dead villain back. Brixton's death, or more accurately, "decommissioning", in Hobbs and Shaw amounted to the mysterious big boss of Eteon ordering his cybernetic body to be turned off, with Brixton falling into the ocean. Normally, this would seem pretty cut-and-dried, but Fast and Furious has plenty of leeway to hand-wave his death away as simply suspended animation and subsequent reactivation, perhaps by Eteon itself in an effort to augment him as Brixton 2.0. Even if Eteon were left out of the equation, the series could play whatever sci-fi card it wants to bring Brixton back. In a nutshell, Fast and Furious can bring Brixton back because it's Fast and Furious.
With two movies left to wrap up the Fast Saga after F9, bringing back an even more powered-up Brixton Lore for one more confrontation is something that should seriously be considered for the series. Brixton is the most purely Fast and Furious villain there is, and a two-part finale could get that much more mileage if he's along for the ride. At this point, he's more machine now than man, and that gives the Fast and Furious series the perfect loophole to bring Brixton Lore back into the game one more time.
