[The Fast and the Furious franchise was the first one I visited on this blog. In anxious anticipation for Fast Five, those posts reappear now only slightly reedited, and now also with links and pics.]
With the third film in a series, you can start to see the franchise take on a distinct personality. The actual quality of the third film, though, can vary wildly. There can be a sudden drop in quality, or a sudden return to quality, or you could have a trilogy (at least temporarily) that aims to bring definite closure to a storyline.
Now, I don’t intend to start every write-up with a broad and pretentious review of series trends, but it seems useful in these early stages. Something I do plan to do regularly, though, is to consider early on why each individual sequel has come into being. As will most often be the case, for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, that answer is money. 2 Fast 2 Furious did not make as much worldwide as The Fast and the Furious, and it cost more to make (both of these common phenomena in sequels), but it made enough for a third go-around to seem profitable.
Per the plot machinations of 2 Fast, we were all primed to enjoy the continuing adventures of uninteresting white guy Brian O’Conner, weren’t we? No, we really could care less about him. In fact, there is NO returning cast in this Fast. Title and producer aside, there is only one common element that unites this film to the rest – Street racing (also, NOS). And unlike Part Two, this one is actually about street racing.
We also have another director switch – Justin Lin. He’s directed little else of serious note, though he did do my favorite episode of “Community.” (That’s the paintball episode, same as everyone would cite.)
So, all new cast, unknown director? This is just some random car movie.
As per the title Tokyo Drift, Tokyo Drift is set in Tokyo. Japan. (Ignore for now that pic above.) All in all, it’s not atypical for the third film to be set in Asia. Generally it’s a sign the ideas have run dry. That’s certainly the case here.
Whatever inspiration there is comes from director Lin. Word has it that the original script was a terribly stereotypical affair, filled with “ching chong bing bong” versions of Asians. Taiwanese Lin felt, as an Asian American, he could at the very least helm this movie effectively to avoid that faux pas.
I think this script wasn’t originally meant to be a Fast and the Furious flick. It’s not uncommon for knock-off scripts to make the rounds following the success of an original. The Fast and the Furious inspired foolish youngsters to pimp out their rides like their fictional heroes, resulting in many useless, ill-equipped ricers clogging up the streets. Surely someone (here screenwriter Chris Morgan) thought this would be an up-and-coming trend, and sought to hop on the tricked-out bandwagon. A few years later, the only thing remaining from that bandwagon was the original series. And so here we are, with a probably-unrelated script not even substantially retooled.
As the first film was a landlocked Point Break, so this film is Initial D. Huh?...What?...An anime series about an 18-year-old who’s into Tokyo drift racing. Ah, but this movie’s different. It’s about a 17-year-old.
We open in that most Japanese of settings: Arizona. A sped-up, music video-style opening credits montage depicts the glamorous world of public high school, as seen through the eyes of troubled youth Sean Boswell (Lucas Black, an actor). Considering the plot shall soon relocate (or drift) to Tokyo, this seems like a lot of effort towards very little purpose, except perhaps for director Lin to mark his territory as a filmmaker with sufficient style chops. Following this pointlessness, Sean soon enough gets into a confrontation with high school quarterback Clay (Zachery Ty Bryan, former “Home Improvement” child star, now an adult and therefore to be hated), douchey, blonde, bloated, and actively sunburning on-screen. This is all over an unnamed cheerleader, and it requires resolution.
It’s race time!, between Sean’s some sort of muscle car and Clay’s non-muscle car sort of a car. They race through a tract home construction site, and what was once charming in E.T. proves stupid and damaging when done with cars. Clay’s coterie of hooting jock minions tries to stymie Sean, but it barely matters. Sean wins the race. Then everyone crashes. There is a rather nice super slow motion shot of Sean inside his some sort of muscle car as it rolls. Here is as good a time as any to mention that the franchise’s irritating use of obtrusive CGI has lessened somewhat. It is no longer used to highlight the cars themselves, and they have dropped the CGI tour of the engine entirely! By normal standards, though, there’s still plenty of CGI, some of it pretty grating, as we shall see.
In the inevitable police station, Clay is let off without even a slap on the wrist, whatever that means. This is just fine with me because it means I no longer have to look at Zachery Ty Bryan’s goon face. Sean’s mom arrives. Growing increasingly aggravated by her son’s continued recklessness, she sees only one solution...
Tokyo montage! Tokyo even gets a screen cap title, because surely otherwise no one would know where the majority of a movie called Tokyo Drift was taking place. Sean has been sent to live with his dad, a U.S. naval officer living off-base. Dad has one rule – No cars.
In the morning Sean treks to his new school, past a nice assembly of modern Japanese cultural markers. As a whole, this film dutifully presents all of Tokyo’s (well-earned) contemporary signifiers, such as pushers, capsule hotels, tittering schoolgirls, and underwear everywhere. There are also plentiful yakuza and sumos, just because. The whole thing seems to take place in the Shinjuku and Shibuya districts, furthering the international impression that the whole city is basically Blade Runner. You’ve seen Lost in Translation? It’s like a popcorn version of that.
At school, Sean meets this entry’s token rapper/actor – Bow Wow, née Lil Bow Wow, performing as fellow gaijin Twinkie – basically a miniature version of Shawshank’s Red. Sean also meets pretty Australian girl Neela (Nathalie Kelley), because God forbid Sean develop a budding romance with an Asian. In fact, not a single member of the central cast has been Asian so far! And how about that acting? Of course, this being a Fast and the Furious film, I am grading on a curve. The actors all capably pronounce the words that are in the screenplay, and with a wide variety of unique accents. But no one can duplicate what Vin Diesel accomplished in the first film, to elevate their flat and unadorned roles into something even approaching iconic. I could further criticize the film for casting people in their mid-20s as high schoolers, but that is such a common Hollywood problem that it barely warrants mention.
The one character given a chance to shine, and the first Asian member of the cast, is Korean actor Sung Kang (a Justin Lin regular), playing Han Lue. Han and Sean first meet at a hashiriya (car nut) gathering in a parking garage. This is where drifting first comes into play, drifting being this film’s one new wrinkle. Where the first film was almost entirely concerned with pure acceleration, and the second added in some maneuvering, this introduces the notion of driving sideways, which is presumably hell on the tires. It makes sense this would develop in car-happy Tokyo, since its crowds and congestion necessitate a different style of driving. Hope you didn’t come here to just see cars drive fast, since that isn’t the movie’s preoccupation. And isn’t it coincidental that every single person Sean meets is wildly obsessed with the secretive subculture this franchise is built upon? At least the other films were about infiltrating that subculture, but this movie simply presupposes its presence, for otherwise there would be no movie.
Sean soon engages in a parking lot race against this entry’s nominal villain, Takashi (Brian Tee), also known as DK, for Drift King, and thank goodness Sean himself makes the obvious Donkey Kong reference so I don’t have to. Han lends Sean use of his black Nissan S15 Silvia against Takashi’s blue, red and white striped other sort of car. Making up for the lack of intrusive CGI, Lin begins employing a ridiculous amount of speed ramping, that lazy post-Matrix trick where the film stock’s speed will randomly speed or slow for no goddamn good reason at all, all accompanied by aggressive “whooshing” noises. Rather unlike the vaguely-competent driving of The Fast and the Furious’ Brian, Sean’s driving (and drifting) is barely adequate. So much so that Takashi delays his own victory in order to egg Sean on. In the end, Sean has wrecked Han’s black Nissan S15 Silvia, possibly beyond all repair.
Now we can begin the boring Second Act which The Fast and the Furious movies (and frankly, damn near all movies) are famous for. Han takes Sean under his wing, ostensibly to pay for ruining his black Nissan S15 Silvia. What follows is a mentor/student relationship that struggles to parallel that of Brian and Dom from Part One. Flat melodrama becomes the name of the game for at least the next half hour, and hardly any of the short, semi-dramatic scenes contained within have any obvious connection to each other. Frankly, it becomes genuinely difficult to tell where the plot is going, and it’s not until the start of the Third Act that any conflict occurs. The focus varies between Sean and Han, or Sean and Neela, or Sean and Takashi, or Sean and Twinkie, or Sean and his dad, or Sean and some randomly introduced minor character. Sense a pattern? Too bad Sean has next to no motivation, beyond the mere desire to “drive real good.” And thus the movie tends to, er, drift. (Oh come on! I had to say that!)
Han’s mentorship inspires a question so obvious it is actually asked in dialogue – Why the hell is Han friends with the useless Sean? The first answer Han gives is because Sean is Takashi’s “kryptonite.” The further answer, seemingly, is because Han sees in Sean a nascent driving skill, despite what Sean has already shown. Over the course of the film, Sean develops a drifting aptitude on a par with Takashi, and far outpacing any of the native drifters. This is the car fu equivalent of an unskilled Caucasian learning to overpower Bruce Lee, and it’s nearly as offensive. Drifting itself takes on a symbolic meaning, as Han says it is not technical driving, but something innate and emotional. Things still seem pretty Point Breakish.
The endless, plotless Second Act continues on dutifully, highlighted by scenes of Sean drifting his new red Evo down twisty mountain roads. Blah blah blah romancing Neela bla blah blah she’s really Takashi’s girl blah blah blah - Where is this plot going?!
Okay, so there are clear plot similarities here with Rebel Without a Cause, with Sean as James Dead, Neela as Natalie Wood, Twinkie as Sal Mineo, Takashi as Corey Allen, and dad as dad. Han has no counterpart. The problem with this parallel is that in Rebel, the inciting incident occurred at the end of Act One. All the character details were meted out efficiently before that, while this movie needs the entirety of Act Two to deliver its similar character details. By the way, there was another car movie in 2006 that featured drifting as a central metaphor for character growth, and it did so far more efficiently. That car movie? Cars.
In retrospect, this middle section has a rather nice scene. Sean comes upon a fight between Twinkie and a local kid claiming Twinkie sold him a faulty product placement iPod. Sean resolves this scene, not by nipping the anonymous nip, but by handing him a new iPod from Twinkie’s cache. What’s nice about this is how it predicts Sean’s resolution in the climax. For as under-motivated as Sean is as a character, at least he is functionally nonviolent.
So it turns out that Han is partners with Takashi, ostensibly a yakuza. Big boss Kamata, fed up with this continued lack of dramatic momentum, pays his nephew Takashi a visit. Kamata, played by the great Sonny Chiba, reveals to Takashi that Han has secretly been skimming millions of yakuza yen. A little Tokyo grift in Tokyo Drift, eh? This is really pretty stupid on Han’s part, and it inevitably drags the naive Sean into eventual conflict with gangsters. Kamata tells Takashi to take care of it, and by the way, all these Japanese characters are speaking together in unaccented English.
Takashi and his two thugs race their cars I didn’t bother to identify over to Han’s garage, where Han, Sean, Twinkie, Neela et al are simply standing around doing nothing, as is their wont. Following a brief bit with a gun, a car chase is underway, with Sean and Neela in his red Evo and Han in his orange...vehicle. This chase through the streets of Tokyo (an effectively disguised Los Angeles) is the film’s centerpiece. Again CGI is largely eschewed, except as a means of touching up the backgrounds – I’m okay with that. The drivers all engage in a neat, if silly stunt where they drift-weave around slower traffic. While racing through the tunnels, one of Takashi’s thugs crashes in a massive pileup ala Live Free and Die Hard that surely kills piles of innocent motorists. How ‘bout that? Takashi’s other thug is now gone too, via some means of editing I did not notice in one viewing.
Here comes the movie’s central moment. Ahead of the drivers is that massive pedestrian crossing at Shibuya, an intersection the size of a football field packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people. And our heroes, including nonviolent Sean, plow right into it! Okay, it’s not so awful. It seems there was a stuntman convention in Tokyo at the time, since every single pedestrian, out of the hundreds there, instantly forms a perfect route for all the speeding cars to drift through. Perhaps drifting is just so common in this fictional version of Tokyo that everyone knows instinctually how to react.
Ultimately the chase ends as Han crashes his orange...vehicle. He dies, mostly because you can’t tell a mentor/student story without killing off the mentor at some point. It “Ups the Drama.”
Oh, and Takashi takes Neela away, because this series remains unsure of how to use its actresses as anything other than tacked-on love interests. Sean has to “fix [his] own mess,” which he does by simply returning the stolen cash back to Kamata. This lengthy, tense moment is what the iPod scene anticipated. Kamata remains, as always, the all-seeing arbitrator of dramatic necessity, so he declares that Sean must also satisfy an obscure Action Sequence Clause. That is, Sean and Takashi shall compete in an honor race, and the loser shall leave Tokyo.
Preparation for such a race must be done in the form of a mechanical montage, so Sean and gang switch out the RB26DETT engine from Han’s wrecked black Nissan S15 Silvia into a green 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback (Sean’s dad’s car because, as a character in a Fast and the Furious movie, he has to be car crazy). This plot development provoked a lot of controversy among car enthusiasts back in 2006, and if there’s any group a Fast and the Furious film does not want to piss off, it’s car enthusiasts. Or horny teenagers. Consider it: the damage to Han’s black Nissan S15 Silvia was all minimal, really, so it would be far easier to repair that than to transplant a RB26DETT engine to an incompatible green 1967 Ford Mustang Fastback. Hell, if I could realize this, it’s a pretty big issue.
Takashi’s twisty mountain racecourse is to us through this film’s one truly irritating CGI moment – what seems to be a single camera shot glides across the entire course, moving through view screens in cell phones and video cameras. Sean and Takashi race each other downslope, in an action sequence that doesn’t have nearly enough variation to justify its extensive length. Imagine it. Two cars make a right turn. Two cars make a left turn. Close-ups of the drivers. Other characters watch on in silent terror. Repeat. Again and again and again. Over the course of seven minutes. Sans dialogue. Eventually, and I mean long after any tension has evaporated, Takashi crashes just before the finish line, meaning he is either dead or has to leave Tokyo. Who knows for sure?
Victorious, Sean is crowned the new “DK,” appropriate since he’d already acquired the nickname “Monkey Boy” (because apparently all Caucasian males look like apes to the Japanese). He is ready for a drift race in his beloved parking garage when Twinkie arrives, announcing that there is a new racer in town, one who has never lost and who knew Han. Sean looks to the opposing notable car for a surprise final cameo – Nick Fury asking him to join the Avengers Initiative! Wait, no...I mean, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel)! Huzzah! In the final few seconds, this thing finds a way to justify calling itself a Fast and the Furious sequel.
Cue end credits. To indicate what a profound influence this series has upon young idiot drivers, the credits do not start with a director tag or anything, but with a disclaimer demanding audiences not imitate anything they saw in this film. Remember, kids, resolving bloody yakuza conflicts with drift driving is dangerous.
Well, as a sequel this was pretty much a bust! I suppose the producers wished to maintain the Fast and the Furious label, even without cast or continuity. The box office tallies seem to agree with this assessment. Tokyo Drift could only make $62.5 million in the U.S. (though a bit more internationally), a fair amount less than its roughly $80 million budget. This kind of performance is what prognosticators honestly expected from the original The Fast and the Furious. Of course The Fast and the Furious was an unexpected sleeper hit, therefore the franchise. But sleeper hits cannot be willed into existence, which seems to be what these first two sequels have tried for. This one in particular feels like a weak retread of Part One, minus the beloved cast that gave that film, well, drive.
But a common rule among the more self-aware franchises is that the worst, least relevant entry is often the precursor to a glorious return to form. Perhaps they could take this film’s fundamentally sound RB26DETT engine and graft it to the prized 1970 Dodge Charger that is Vin Diesel.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 1 The Fast and the Furious (2001)
• No. 2 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
• No. 4 Fast & Furious (2009)
• No. 5 Fast Five (2011)
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