In a pivotal scene in one of this summer's biggest blockbusters, Furious 7's Hobbs — played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson — physically flexes out of the cast protecting his injured arm while declaring that "Daddy's gotta go to work." It is objectively one of the baddest-ass things ever to happen in a major motion picture. Immediately afterward, Hobbs races to the aid of Toretto and crew, who are engaged in a hellish firefight with some sort of international war criminal on the streets of LA.
But my colleagues at SB Nation just tweeted this:
Miami, your choice is clear #TheRock4MiamiHC #GottaGoToWork https://t.co/HVUnwlZaiD pic.twitter.com/IEnhtS5LXp
— SB✯Nation CFB (@SBNationCFB) October 26, 2015
Look carefully.
Look again. right at the moment when the cast breaks in two.
There is no arm.
This changes everything. Consider the implications of a Hobbs who has lost an arm: he'd be no less an unstoppable force, but now he has the added benefit of bionics. Perhaps he attaches a flamethrower, or a minigun. (Later in the film, Hobbs uses a giant minigun that he ripped off of a crashed drone with his bare hands, but a bionic Hobbs wouldn't have had to do that.) In the scene where Toretto lays unconscious, a robo-Hobbs could use some sort of sophisticated "health limb" to perform routine diagnostics and simple surgeries.
Yes, I understand this is an alternate reality — in the actual film, you can clearly see that the cast is already partially pulled off here, and his arm miraculously returns intact in the next scene — but I think we've approached the point in the series where I'm ready for a Six Million Dollar Man.
Furious 8 is slated to come out in April of 2017. I will be looking for that arm.