This film makes a half-hearted effort to be about something more than cheap thrills.
By: Elise Nakhnikian
"What’s the point of racing?" Han (Sung Kang) asks Shawn (Lucas Black of Friday Night Lights) in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the third movie in the Fast and Furious cycle.
"To prove you’re better than the other guy," Shawn replies.
"It just proves you’re faster," says Han.
Got that, grasshopper?
As any kid with a go-kart knows, driving fast is a blast but watching someone else drive is a bore. Sure, Hollywood loves a chase scene and NASCAR is the ultimate American sport, but it can be pretty tedious to watch a bunch of cars buzzing around in circles like so many clustering bumblebees. What keeps us looking is the adrenaline rush of watching speeding hunks of metal and glass narrowly avoid collision, the anticipation of seeing at least one spectacular slo-mo crash, and the yen to see our hero triumph.
Halfway through, Tokyo Drift makes a half-hearted effort to be about something more than those cheap thrills. Shawn talks about taking responsibility for cleaning up the mess he has made and arranges to pay off his debt to society by… racing his arch-rival down a twisty mountain road at night? Whatever.
But never mind the message: The title tells you all you need to know about this one. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is about hot girls, hot cars and young men who keep challenging one another, like elk locking horns in mating season. Which would be more than enough, if it were done with the energy and conviction that Tokyo Drift mostly lacks.
The "drift" of the title refers to a style of driving that started in Japan and is now gaining popularity here, which involves braking while going fast so as to send your car into a deliberate slide. Shawn encounters it when he winds up in Tokyo after the property damage caused by his drag racing catches up with him. In a desperate attempt to keep him out of jail, his mother sends him to live with his father, a sorely underdeveloped character who talks a lot about his house rules but doesn’t seem to do a thing to enforce them.
But that part of the plot has nothing to do with driving really fast, so it’s essentially dropped when Shawn heads off to school, where he promptly hooks up with Twink (Bow Wow), an American Army brat who’s a one-man black market and a member of the local drag racing scene. And so, by a happy coincidence, is Neela (Nathalie Kelley), the hot Eurasian girl Shawn ogled on his first day of class.
Neela turns out to be hooked up with DK the Drift King (played by Brian Tee, and not to be confused with BK the burger monarch), who dominates the scene in the parking garage and on the corkscrewing mountain roads where the racers and their groupies gather. Shawn hits on her anyhow, and of course she flirts back.
Then Han, an independent-minded sidekick of DK’s, takes Shawn under his wing, giving him a car and teaching him to drift, and there’s nothing left to do but wait for Shawn’s showdown with DK and watch the action.
The controlled skid of a drift is a dreamily appealing sight, particularly when a tight succession of cars sidles around the mountain at night in a carefully synchronized dance. But for most of the racing scenes, director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, Annapolis) and cinematographer Stephen F. Windon (House of Wax) fail to find new or interesting ways to shoot the action, frequently reverting to the trick of showing the race as it’s captured by spectators on their cell phone cameras.
The setting might have provided more color too. Instead, there are only a few stereotypical glimpses of Japanese life, such as the literally paper-thin walls of Shawn’s father’s tiny apartment, the Pachinko parlors Shawn passes and the sumo wrestler he encounters in a sauna, and the great Sonny Chiba’s appearance as a bemused-looking yakuza.
The movie’s most memorable image is the garage where the drifters meet, a hormonal stew of cowboy-hatted girls in micro-miniskirts and slouching, sneery boys doing their best James Dean imitations, but even that feels a little too stagey. Black and Tee seem angry and self-consciously tough enough to be believable as rebel royalty, but some of the other drifters are less convincing. Kang in particular lacks presence, coming off as bland rather than cool.
But then, what can you expect from a movie that thinks you’ll be thrilled by a Vin Diesel cameo?
Rated PG-13 for reckless and illegal behavior involving teens, violence, language and sexual content.