Directed by: Justin Lin
Cast: Lucas Black, Brandon Brendel, Zachery Ty Bryan, & Daniel Booko
Runtime: 104 min.
Rating: PG-13
Trailer

Watching The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is like (pardon the pun) watching a car wreck. It’s an awful site but you just can’t help but keep watching. That sums up the latest, and hopefully the last, entry into the franchise. I will not bore you with the completely arbitrary plot, but Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) heads to Tokyo to live with his deadbeat father to avoid jail sentence in the Unites States. And what happens when he’s in Tokyo you might ask? He is caught up in a world of underground racing of course! Full of scantily dressed Harajuku girls, expensive suped up cars, and a handful of badass Asian Mafioso’s. Oh and he falls in love with Neela (Nathalie Kelley) along the way. The problem with movies like this is not so much how they are directed. All three Fast and the Furious movies look pretty much the same. Since the first one, the focus has shifted from the characters themselves, and more towards the cars – making them characters of their own. Take the climax of the film for example. Sean has to race the Drift King (Brian Tee) to win back Neela and their freedom. The characters are so underdeveloped that I couldn’t care less if they both became hired lackeys for the Japanese Mafia. The race takes place down a large mountain with narrow, winding roads. But, why is it shot a nighttime? Are the special effects so terrible that director Justin Lin and cinematographer Stephen F. Windon decided to hide them? What we end up with is a boring 15-minute sequence of two dark blurred images drifting down a hill. We can’t even see the cars well enough to care how they’re doing! I could go on for several more paragraphs about why this is a terrible movie. The acting, the dreadful cameo at the end, the disjointed philosophical clichéd dung that Sean’s friend Han (Sung Kang) tries to drill into the 13 year old emo crowd watching the film…ah who cares. So why a star and a half? Well, it is better than 2 Fast 2 Furious. That was a zero star movie. But that’s not saying much.

SS
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006