Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Posted by Greg

February 28, 2008

Let Your Axle Bone Slide

**/12 out of *****

For those of you that say movies aren’t educational, I say to you: Bah! If it weren’t for the triad of flicks in the Fast and Furious family, I never would have known that there exists a worldwide underground culture of people who pour thousands of dollars into their cars for the prestige of illegal drag racing. I also wouldn’t have known that all the men in the culture are gangstas, all the women are Penthouse models with clothes to match and everything - EVERYTHING - can be solved by racing cars.

After the dumb but enjoyable first film, the dumb and barely enjoyable second film comes the dumb and only just likeable third film, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift. The story tells of a young rebel hot-rod connoisseur named Sean (Lucas Black) who gets in over his head back home, and is sent packing to live with his military Father in Japan. Despite being banned from racing, the first person he meets happens to be the one guy who can get him into the Tokyo racing underworld, where ‘drifting’ rules (for those who don’t know, it’s when most of your time racing is spent sliding sideways). Before you know it, Sean’s in over his head again, crushing on the wrong girl who ‘belongs’ to the wrong guy.

If the plot sounds familiar - troubled teen with single guardian moves to unfamiliar new place, hits on bully’s girl, finds mentor, learns new skill, emerges triumphant - you’re not alone. You might remember the story when it was called The Karate Kid, except they skedaddled all the ‘Hee-ya!’s and shoehorned in a few “Vroom!’s.

To say that the movie is predictable is a bit of an understatement, although there’s one boundary it does manage to push - trying to get us to believe that Sean and the girl he manages to fall for (chipmunk-cheeked Nathalie Kelley) are in High School. How come girls didn’t look like that when I was 17?

One of the things that the movie does have going for it though is a fairly likeable cast. Black - despite his goofy southern drawl - is easy to sympathise with, even though he barely has any room to show more than one or two emotions. His nemesis, the swaggering DK (Brian Tee) plays nasty pretty well, although he’s almost the same Johnny Tran character that Rick Yune played in the first F&F movie. And why is his head at a permanent 30 degree down-angle?

As is the trend with the F&F movies, there’s a rapper-turned-actor featured prominently. First it was Ludacris, then Tyrese Gibson, now it’s Bow Wow, playing Twinkie, Sean’s only friend. Can’t really say much either way here - he tries his best, but Oscar won’t be knocking. The only actor that stands out in the whole crew is Sung Kang, playing Sean’s mentor Han. I wish he would have had more screen time - he’s got a humbly-cool screen presence that would make him a star in the right role.

But the thing that holds the movie back from being anything other than throwaway popcorn entertainment is the really dumb script. Other than the four or five main characters, every other person comes off as a sad cliché, either a block-headed, gangsta jock or a skanky, half-dressed glamour queen. One high-school girl publicly offers herself as the prize for the winner of a drag race, and most of the guys pull a Corey Hart and try to look tough by wearing sunglasses at night, shiny jackets and a toothpick hanging out of their mouth. Oooh.. scary.

The writing is mostly amateur hour, with lines like “If you ain’t out of control, you ain’t in control.” What does that mean? That’s like saying “If you ain’t awake, you ain’t asleep.” Another moment has a character convincing his dad to let him face down some Yakuza gangsters by saying “I gotta do this!” Ahhh… good parenting never dies.

But beyond all this, the movie is all about driving, drifting and racing, which it does with much love. The cars sure are pretty and offer a world of temptation to automobile fetishists. World champion drift racers were consultants on the film, and most of the race sequences are done with flair and end up being quite exciting. As I said before, it seems that racing is the only way to solve things in this new world I’m learning about. Public dispute? Race! Money problems? Race? Brain tumour? No problem, a race’ll fix that!

Too bad a race can’t fix a lame script.

Movie Reviews