"Rethink your heroes" is close to being a trend for blockbusters in 2017; what with both the noble Autobot, Optimus Prime, and family-oriented racing enthusiast Dominic Toretto turning to "evil" in this year's Transformers and Fast & Furious movie franchise installments, respectively. Vin Diesel reprises his role as Dom in this April's The Fate of the Furious (aka. Fast & Furious 8) but as the first teaser trailer released for the film illustrates, Dom has turned against his extended family and is now working for a mysterious criminal known as simply Cipher (played by Charlize Theron).
Following the success of Furious 7 - a critically-acclaimed addition to the franchise that grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide in theaters - The Fate of the Furious is poised to keep the continuously-evolving Fast & Furious brand going strong as ever, once it arrives on the scene. Universal is doing its part to make certain of that too, by releasing a new trailer for the film, as part of the larger wave of movie and TV show previews hitting the scene during this year's Super Bowl LI festivities.
The new Fate of the Furious trailer premiered during the second quarter of the Big Game itself, as Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson (who is playing Agent Hobbs for the fourth time here) promised that it would, yesterday. The trailer doesn't shed too much new light on the storyline for director F. Gary Gray's Fast & Furious film, other than to reemphasize that Dom has gone "rogue" for as-yet unexplained reasons - and it's up to his extended family to save him, with help from not only Hobbes and "Mr. Nobody" (Kurt Russell), but a former enemy of theirs, too.
Jason Statham joined the Fast & Furious universe as Deckard Shaw, brother of Fast & Furious 6 villain Owen Shaw, in Furious 7 and had been locked away under heavy security (and Hobbes' watchful eye), by the end of that movie. The previously-released theatrical trailer for The Fate of the Furious had already confirmed that Shaw is recruited to help Hobbes and the others defeat Cipher and, hopefully, save Dom in the process. Still, the Super Bowl trailer does offer a taste of what is sure to not be the last tense exchange between the movie's heroes and the man who tried to kill them, on their last adventure.
So far, Gray and his cast/crew look to deliver where it counts with Fate of the Furious; including, some fun tweaks to the established main character dynamics and some enjoyably over the top set pieces and action sequences, set in locations around the globe (Cuba, Iceland, New York and so forth). It might have its roots in a pulpy genre movie from the early 2000s rather than a comic book property, but thus far the Fast & Furious series only looks to further cement its status as one of the best "superhero" franchises around, with The Fate of the Furious (see Roman's death-defying move at the end of the Super Bowl trailer, for case in point).
NEXT: How Fast & Furious Became the New James Bond
Source: Universal Pictures
