The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Directed by: Justin Lin
Starring: Lucas Black, Sung Kang, Brian Tee, Nathalie Kelley
Rated: PG-13 for reckless and illegal behavior involving teens, violence, language and sexual content.
Parental Notes: This is a fairly innocuous film aside from the over-the-top racing. Provided you trust your preteen or teen not to be overly influenced to take up street racing, this should be a fine film for them.
If you are reading this review to find out whether or not you should see “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” the answer is probably no. Folks who will enjoy this movie can almost certainly tell from the previews that they will and don’t need a reviewer to tell them. This is not a problematic film, full of character development, deep philosophical questions, and complex storylines. Those films may send you to the reviews before they draw you to the theater, but a big, stupid action fest like “Tokyo Drift” is another beast entirely. Although it shares its title with two earlier racing-related films, all that ties the movie itself to “The Fast and the Furious” and “2 Fast 2 Furious” is a cameo near the end.
Shawn (Lucas Black, “Jarhead”) is a teenager in trouble. He likes racing fast cars and getting into trouble, and gets sent to live with his dad, a Navy guy in Tokyo, so that he won’t wind up in jail. Black plays Shawn with plenty of country drawl and a terrific cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. He looks like he had a ton of fun playing this rowdy kid, and it’s easy to forgive the fact that he’s significantly older than the seventeen Shawn is supposed to be.
Of course, Shawn winds up in the underground racing scene in Tokyo too. Run by the local bigwig, D.K. (Brian Tee, “Fun with Dick and Jane”), it’s a blend of Japanese fashion, wild parties, and incredible races. The racing scenes are mind blowing, from the big-bang opening of the film to the mother of all chase scenes near the end. There’s very little in the way of obvious visual effects — CGI helps blend camera shots together to give one long view of particularly impressive race sequences, but that seems to have been about it.
The film’s subtitle comes from drifting, a graceful method of skidding around corners that is all the rage in the film’s races. If you do it right, you are able to slide your car around sharp turns at incredible speeds. If you do it wrong, as Shawn finds out all too quickly when Han (Sung Kang, “The Motel”) loans him a very nice car to race D.K., you crash into things. It’s stunning to watch the way the stunt drivers put the cars through their paces, slaloming around slower cars on the streets, around curves in mountain roads, and even up and down the spiral ramp in a parking garage.
While Han teaches Shawn how to drift so that he can race and earn money to cover the car he wrecked, a romantic subplot is offered in the form of D.K.’s girlfriend, Neela (Nathalie Kelley, making her debut). Shawn falls for her nigh-instantly, which only makes D.K. dislike him more. When D.K. and Han wind up on opposite sides of a gang war of sorts, Shawn chooses Han’s side, and soon even D.K.’s Yakuza uncle is taking notice of the brouhaha.
Fortunately the violence is fairly low key and mostly perpetrated against cars. Auto lovers will cringe at the damage inflicted on all the beautiful racing cars, but action fans will be cheering. This is a big, dumb racing movie with no pretensions. It’s good summer entertainment, but eminently forgettable.