Daily Music News

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

June 16th, 2006

If there were an organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Multi-Ethnic Music Video Hootchies, they would surely find great investment and reward in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, given that it would gainfully employ so much of their membership.Brawny, testosteronized action flicks like this are always being accused, sometimes quite unfairly, of being unthinkingly misogynistic, but the third installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise tells us forthrightly what it thinks of women when, in the first 10 minutes of its perfunctory setup, it has the putative high school girlfriend of one character offer herself up by purring, “Why don’t you race for me?” and then has our lead character’s middle-aged mother winkingly come on to a police officer who’s arrested her son. Nice. I’m sure Betty Friedan would enthusiastically approve.

Much ass-slapping and ogling of micro-skirts ensues — as much as a PG-13 rating will allow, at any rate. If both completely conforming to audience expectation (for the randy party base) and finding new ways to tweak and/or subvert it are the two sometimes at-odds goals for genre cash-dashes of this ilk, Tokyo Drift arguably “succeeds” only in the first regard: staffed by a small army of sound mixers, sound editors, rotoscope artists and digital effects compositors, it’s a movie every bit as loud and predictably dreadful as one might imagine.

The story centers on Sean Boswell (Friday Night Lights’ Lucas Black), a headstrong Texas kid whose toothy grin always seems to get him in trouble with the jock boyfriends of every girl with which he flirts. Sean’s got a jones for racing, too, but his latest escapade ranks as a third strike, which causes that aforementioned floozy of a mother of his to ship Sean off to Japan to live with his estranged father, a career military man. Now a gaijin twice over, Sean hooks up with Army brat Twinkie (Bow Wow), and discovers the world of drift racing — comprised of hairpin turns and switchbacks born both of Tokyo’s cramped urban confines and winding mountain roads.

Sean disrespects the reigning king of this scene, D.K. (Brian Tee), by, yes, chatting up his girlfriend Neela (newcomer Nathalie Kelley). D.K. is the nephew of Kamata (Sonny Chiba), an underworld crime boss, but Sean doesn’t back down, accepting a race in which he borrows a car from Han (Sung Kang), D.K.’s friend and associate. Unfamiliar with drifting, Sean loses, wrecking the car in the process. Indebted to Han, he begins accompanying him on errands, winning over his trust and establishing a rapport with him. After Sean defends Twinkie from one of D.K.’s thugs and bests the same goon in a race, D.K. becomes even more furious (though not necessarily faster), setting up a final stakes race confrontation on a steep mountain descent.

While Black has some twangy charisma, he’s given precious little with which to work. Cellular scribe Chris Morgan’s screenplay is an exercise in pure functionality; two elementary school kids sitting next to me at a screening kept themselves busy between mouthfuls of popcorn and soda by predicting the call-and-response of dialogue. Combining CGI with practical stunt work, director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, Annapolis) brings a small measure of flash to some of the movie’s race sequences, but the spatial relationships so crucial to their understanding and emotional investment are lacking, and the gauzy nighttime setting of the penultimate showdown blunts its impact.

The film’s locale is somewhat novel, and Black — who’s all growed up and filled out from his Sling Blade days — certainly a serviceable guide. Still, I can’t think of a particularly compelling reason to see The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, though if an eager moviegoer does they’ll surely be rewarded with ample portions of the colorfully expected. But, you ask, aren’t films like these not designed for critics? On the one hand, yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need be so distressingly clichéd in their treatment of women and other supporting characters, and completely foreseeable in every other regard

Entry Filed under: Music Related News, Hip Hop