Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift Review
Posted by Bryan Kristopowitz on 06.19.2006
Excruciating. Tedious. Awful. One of the worst movies ever made. Makes "Hostel" seem entertaining.
"Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" Review
Lucas Black- Sean Boswell
Bow Wow- Twinkie
Nathalie Kelley- Neela
Brian Tee- DK
Sung Kang- Han
Zachary Ty Bryan- Clay
Nikki Griffin- Cindy
Christian Salazar- Fat kid
Directed by Justin Lin
Screenplay by Chris Morgan, Alfredo Botello, and Kario Salem
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Rated PG-13 for reckless and illegal behavior involving teens, violence, language and sexual content
Runtime- 104 minutes
Website: http://www.thefastandthefurious3.com
After suffering through the awful "Streets of Legend" recently (review here), this reviewer made a personal pledge to stay away from "car" movies. The street racing crap, as it were. The genre certainly has its fans and this reviewer isn't going to begrudge anyone his or her entertainment. If you understand, like, enjoy, "dig" this type of movie, good for you. Watch until you can't watch anymore. What does this reviewer care? So, here we are a few weeks later and this reviewer has ignored his own personal pledge for no reason other than "it was the only movie playing at the time" and has seen the third "The Fast and the Furious" flick, "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," a truly excruciating experience. This reviewer wishes he had fought more with himself and kept that pledge.
Lucas Black is Sean Boswell, a hip and edgy bad butt hoodlum kid with no friends and a penchant for starting crap with people. He eats McDonald's at lunch by himself, has no interest in helping out the fat kid getting his jelly belly spray painted in shop class, and really has no interest in school anyway. He's been to a million schools in his lifetime. He's a trouble making delinquent, after all. One afternoon he makes bedroom eyes at some blonde skank Cindy (Nikki Griffin) who we find out is the girlfriend of perennial preppy douchebag Zachery Ty Bryan. Bryan's Clay character engages in some preening macho jag off stuff with Sean, Clay throws a baseball through Sean's Monte Carlo's rear window, and they decide to have a race. Of course, Sean is so tough he can't be bothered to race for anything but "pinks" but decides just this one time to race for the blonde skank. The "race" is held in a still being built housing development. Some car driving happens, a big crash ensues, and we get to see how much of a bad guy Sean is. The cops want him to go to jail but his mother speaks up for him and manages to get him off with a kind of super probation: if he goes to live with his father in Japan he won't go to jail. And so off we go to Japan.
Sean is a fish out of water. He's still super hip and edgy but not quite as super hip and edgy as the young people in Tokyo. He's been admonished by his father to stay away from cars and stay on the straight and narrow (go to school, do your homework, do as your told, and stay the heck away from cars and trouble you freaking hoodlum). The school he goes to requires a uniform (aha! See, they're all trying to tame this wild dude! For shame!) and the ability to understand Japanese. Within minutes we find out that he doesn't have to worry about that because there is a black kid there named Twinkie (Bow Wow) who can help him. So some hooey goes on and very quickly Sean is introduced to the local hip and edgy youth car racing scene. So Twinkie introduces him to all of the super cool hip hop Japanese street thugs and always smiling females and beyond super cool macho scumbag Japanese tough guys (the head of which is DK, as played by the horrible Brian Tee). Some staring, standing around all music video like ensues, and then the car racing begins again. This time, though, the cars have to "drift," which is essentially dirt tracking on pavement. Sean, all tough no matter what, screws up and can't drift with the locals and destroys the car he is given to race. Sean's car owner, as it were, Han (Sung Kang, who looks like he's bored throughout) is a courier guy for yakuza mobsters or something and enlists Sean's "abilities" to go around and collect money. Pretty soon all kinds of stupid stuff happens as Sean learns how to "drift," he falls for the boring Australian bimbo Neela (Nathalie Kelley) who is also the girlfriend of DK, he learns Japanese through assimilation (essentially), and he has an argument with his father. We eventually get to meet DK's yakuza biggie uncle Kamata (Sonny Chiba), have to endure more car stuff that never goes anywhere, and then witness a car rebuild. Oh, yeah, and (and this isn't a spoiler because he appears now quite prominently in the TV commercials) Vin Diesel shows up for no reason.
This movie just sucks.
First, Lucas Black has zero charisma. He can't act, has no voice range, and isn't at all likeable as the lead macho dude. He's like a younger version of Josh Lucas. But then, too, the moviemakers don't give him much to do other than be a low rent crap version of what some guy thinks is Snake Plissken (the whole bit where he doesn't help the fat kid is reminiscent of the scene in "Escape From New York" where Snake doesn't help the girl getting raped. Oooh! He's an anti-hero! That's gotta make him ultra cool, right? You need to have presence on the screen in order to pull that off, people). His character isn't at all likeable and we couldn't give two craps what happens to him. When he gets to Japan we hope he gets mugged or gets the crap kicked out of him. Nathalie Kelley isn't that much better. She's the mob girl who falls for the loner white guy and ends up altering her life to be with him. Or something. Bow Wow actually has some screen presence and his character is kind of interesting, but he isn't given much to do other than "black guy" stuff. Zachary Ty Bryan is the only one who manages to elicit much of a reaction (he can almost act). We all hope he gets what's coming to him, but we don't want Black's character to do the justice dealing. We hope Black goes down with him.
And then there are the Japanese actors. Horrendous on all fronts. Condescending, psychotic thugs and hoodlums, degenerate street punks who would probably make suitable racist movie villains if, you know, the hero had a scintilla of likeability. So, their lackluster performance as a whole is Lucas Black's fault. Brian Tee has one facial expression and one mean stance and that's about it. And he always has his head titled to the side. Is this reviewer supposed to crap his pants at how "cool" he is? And, yeah, Sung Kang looks bored throughout. Laid back? Not really. Probably realizes that this story is terrible but he can't get out of it. He signed on the dotted line. Sonny Chiba manages to elicit a kind of screen energy, but that's mostly because we know that is Sonny Chiba.
The car scenes are fairly decent. If you like these suped up cars you're probably more apt to like them. No one ever really explains what "drifting" is or why people do it (wouldn't constantly doing that ruin the tires, forcing the car owner to have to buy new sets of tires ever few hours?). It stops being interesting as a visual after the first forty five minutes and then just becomes monotonous. And isn't it a rule in these movies to have a really good car chase at the end? The car chase here is so tedious you can't wait for it to be over. That is not good. And the ending just goes on way, way, way too long. Way too long. This reviewer can't emphasize that enough.
So we're in Japan, right? A fish out of water story. Americans "know" stuff about the Japanese, but these things are never brought up or explored. If an American kid (Black's character has a US Navy father presumably stationed in the country for whatever reason) can't speak Japanese and is sent to a Japanese school, why don't the school administrators have him in a class that uses English? Yeah, he has to be assimilated into the language and the best way to do that is to get him around people who speak the language, but how the heck is he going to know what his homework and stuff is? And why the heck aren't these Japanese kids constantly studying? Isn't that what we've all been told the past twenty years, that the Japanese are education machines who excel at everything? So where is the studying? And where do these kids get these suped up cars from? Rich parents? Are they all street criminals? American movies never explain this either. We don't get to see much in the way of TV or music in the country, and the one bit where we see kids playing soccer on top of city roof doesn't go anywhere. There's all kinds of culture stuff they could have emphasized to at least get us to sympathize with Black's outsider predicament. But then, this movie isn't about people being sympathetic. It's about walking around all tough so the gals will always smile at you and the other tough guys won't question the size of your you know what.
Why is it so hard to have likeable characters? Heck, why is it so hard to have heroes?
Whatever.
If you liked the other two movies, you'll probably like this one. Otherwise avoid this movie at all costs. It just ain't worth your time. It's awful, terrible, a complete waste.
And can we please stop with these young hoodlums starring in these movies? Can we get some people who can act?
The 411: “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” is one of the worst movies ever made. Ever. It’s terrible from second one to the end. Avoid it unless you liked the first two. You may understand it.
