Fast Month - The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

The Fast and the Furious franchise nearly died here. This movie failed critically and at the box office. It made $158.5m on an $85m budget, would’ve needed to have made about $200m to be profitable. I guess the success of the other 2 was enough to convince Universal to try again with 4, but it could well have died here.

So, what the hell happened here? Let’s take a look.

Tokyo Drift decides, in its infinite 'wisdom,' to ditch just about everything from the first 2. First, let me introduce the new, bland as bread protagonist, Sean Boswell, he’s a ‘high school’ student. When he races a generic one-note jock and crushes his car, his only hope is for some reason to stay with his father in Japan (wait, what?) there he immediately and with no real intention gets involved in their version of street racing, and ends up talking to the one person who’s the girlfriend of a guy who’s Uncle’s in the Yakuza. But street racing in Japan is slightly different than in the US. We’re ditching the high Octane drag races to long ass drifting, can Sean learn very quickly to drift and beat his Yakuza-light rival? I don’t care.

Let’s start with perhaps the biggest problem with this, it doesn’t feel like what the Fast and Furious movies were. It’s set in Japan, it’s focused on drifting as opposed to speed, the plot revolves around a high-schooler and Brian Walker doesn’t feature at all, with Vin Diesel making only a cameo that feels very much like it was added at the last minute (although it does form a basis for a retcon later). Even the themes of the movie are more about setting things right than the family dynamic you see slightly in earlier and a lot in later Fast and Furious movies.

Lucas Black plays Sean Boswell and I don’t know what’s up, but this is not a great performance. I had to check he was born in America because the accent sounds faked, and there’s not a lot of emotion out of him. It may just be the direction, but I don’t get this problem out of everyone. It doesn’t help that I’ve seen similar high school arcs beforehand these are not movies aimed at high-schoolers, why is the protagonist a high schooler? Oh, because he needed to be young enough that he could be sent to Japan rather than jailed for the stunt at the beginning, ok…

Han, played by Sung Kang is the best part of the movie, which is why he’s brought back and Fast and Furious 4-6 are in fact prequels to this one. He’s smooth, he’s witty, but you don’t want to double-cross him. I see why he and Toretto were friends. That said, him trying to steel money from under the nose of the Yakuza was pretty stupid, and we’re lead to believe it lead to his untimely death, even though they retcon that at the end of 6.

Takashi, the drift king, is the villain and he’s not that great. His hold over Neela (we’ll get to her) feels kinda petty, and his relationship with his uncle just made me feel like he was a bit stupid. There’s no antagonistic portion of it though, his Uncle just worked out what Han was doing with a snap of his fingers, despite barely understanding what was in front of him. Han is an idiot for doing it, Takashi is an idiot for not realising it.

So, what would a Fast and Furious movie be without female sex objects? Apparently, we needed one in this HIGH SCHOOL MOVIE. for what it’s worth, Neela is not in and of herself a bad character, but she is also the mcguffin item that basically drives the plot. She does have a backstory that is semi-relevant but it’s hardly the stuff of great writing material.

There is a lot of contrivances in this movie that exist to move the plot forward. The situation with talking to a girl angering the jock and resulting in a race that results in a wrecked car in the opening is copied pretty much verbatim when they get to Japan as a part of the main narrative. The father is pretty much pointless. And I didn’t even think of mentioning the kid that sells sh*t for Han. Twinkie… yeah, I’m dead serious with that name?

Tokyo drift is not without merit though, the driving still looks pretty good, and it’s actually nice to have the drifting spin on the classic races but it ended up drifting too far out of its comfort zone, and Han did not have the appeal of Dominic Torretto (yet). So, for the next one it’s back to basics, Paul and Vin return, next time

Rating 50/100