The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift review by Sam Osborn of www.samseescinema.com
rating: 1.5 out of 4
Director: Justin Lin Cast: Lucas Black, Nathalie Kelley Screenplay: Alfredo Botello, Chris Morgan, Kario Salem MPAA Classification: PG-13 (reckless and illegal behavior involving teens, violence, language and sexual content)
I think the question on everybody's mind right now is, "Why?" The first was fine, the second was a stretch, and now the third in the rusty Fast and Furious franchise has hopefully blown its final gasket. Hollywood's case of Sequelitis is out of control and it has birthed a dead-on-arrival basket of loud noises, drooling testosterone and neon flashing lights.
The trilogy-capper takes a trip to Tokyo, where our headstrong hero, Shawn Boswell (Lucas Black), learns the ropes of drifting in Japan's underworld racing scene. Shawn is a child of divorce, living with his mother and hop-scotching across Texas, dodging misdemeanors and a pesky driving ban. But when Shawn racks up property damages by remodeling a home with his muscle car, he's sent to his father's place in Tokyo. Dad's a Navy man and played by Brian Goodman, reprising an identical role he played earlier this year in Annapolis. The typical divorce-resentment/son-hates-father tricks are played and soon Shawn's wrapped up with Twinkie (Bow Wow) and Han (Sung Kang), his new friends in the racing world. The villain here is the Drift King (Brian Tee) who has the girl, Neela (Nathalie Kelley), the connections to the Yakuza, and the driving muscle to beat Shawn in any drift race posed.
All put together, the story has the intelligence of an elbow. It's meant only to be filler, spacing out the reel time between the noisy racing sequences. But filler should at least be distracting; and the poor-boy-loves-taken-rich-girl tactic is far from inspired.
Tokyo Drift's predecessors capitalized on the star power of their leading men. Vin Diesel could musk up the room with his oozing testosterone and growled one-liners and Paul Walker could twinkle his surfer-boy eyes with Tyrese's muscle flexing menacingly behind him. Lucas Black can, uhm, twang out his Texas accent? The boy has no charisma and Bow Wow doesn't have enough muscle to intimidate a squirrel. But the screenplay doesn't help much, giving Lucas' character the everyman treatment and hoping Neela's curves will woo the adolescent boys into a pubescent haze that puts the blinds on bad writing.
As for the racing-and that's all we really come for-the shift to drifting isn't as exciting as it seemed. Aside from a couple flashes of creative car stunts, the racing is mostly the same, but longer, with more smoke and brightly painted vehicles. I'll take a Michael Bay car chase scene over this stuff any day. It's not only faster, but certainly more furious (the joke had to be made sometime. Sorry.) Nobody explains the mechanics of drifting and so we never know enough to care about it. Han writes it off at one point, saying "It's something you can't teach." Well, Cars did a better job of explaining a drift, and Cars was damn Disney picture.
-www.samseescinema.com
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