The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Directed by Justin Lin
Written by Chris Morgan
Starring Lucas Black, Bow Wow, Nathalie Kelley
Classification: PG
Rating: **
For all of the movie's melancholy charm, one couldn't help but notice Lost in Translation's lack of hot car chases. The makers of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift thoughtfully address this unfortunate failing in their own tale of a young American struggling to cope with feelings of culture clash amid the neon-lit streets of the Japanese metropolis.
As it turns out, the addition of hot car chases to this basic scenario leaves little room for anything else that might attract an audience, so it's just as well that Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson didn't spend any time peeling rubber in a twin-turbo Nissan 350Z. But anyone who still longs to see gaijin yahoos tear up Tokyo's streets will be appeased by the high-speed action in this perfunctory but reasonably efficient entry in the franchise spawned by the 2001 surprise hit The Fast and the Furious.
Though it jettisons the characters in the first two movies (aside from a goofy last-minute cameo by one of the original's stars), Tokyo Drif t follows a familiar course. Busted too many times for reckless driving back in the United States, Sean ( Friday Night Lights's Lucas Black) hightails it to Tokyo to live with his estranged military dad.
Twinkie (Bow Wow), a new pal at his foreigner-heavy high school, introduces him to Tokyo's subculture of car nuts. Sean thinks it'll be easy to rule this scene, but he doesn't understand that speed means less to these drivers than finesse. What matters is how well you "drift," i.e., navigate tight turns or move the car laterally in what looks like a controlled skid. As a driving technique, it's gratingly loud, weirdly graceful and hell on your tires.
Han (Sung Kang), an Asian-American expat, agrees to teach Sean in hopes of taking down a hot-headed hoodlum named DK (Brian Tee), short for Drift King. Sean also takes an interest in DK's Latina girlfriend Neela (Nathalie Kelley), prompting Han to quip, "Why can't you find a nice Japanese girl like all the other white guys around here?"
Perhaps because it's directed by an Asian-American - Justin Lin, who made his debut with the 2002 indie Better Luck Tomorrow - The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is largely free of the cultural stereotyping that afflicts most Hollywood productions set in Japan. Even so, the typical signifiers of foreignness are here - weird vending machines, pachinko parlours, a nude sumo wrestler - in a hyper-stylized Tokyo where barely anyone speaks Japanese and no skirt goes more than three inches south of the hip.
As flashy and inane as its predecessors, Lin's entry at least trumps them with superior vehicular stunts, most of them real rather than tricked out with CGI. The director also makes a nod to Japan's rich history of genre filmmaking by casting action legend J.J. Sonny Chiba as a cigar-smoking yakuza. Chiba's presence momentarily classes up a passable youths-ploitation flick into a transcendent piece of movie trash.