The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
Directed by Justin Lin
Did Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift mean to evoke the careening, beautiful terror of David Lynch's Mullholland Drive and Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief in its final do-or-die car race atop a curvaceous mountain? Maybe, maybe not. That my mind wandered to such auteurish heights, even for a random moment, suggests the accidentally interesting bits lurking beneath the asphalt here. Though that climactic race between a dim American neo-cowboy and a slick Japanese mobster is as predictable and emotionally charged as an Xbox game, this third installment juices up a flimsy franchise. By jettisoning all previous characters and deporting the action from the U.S. (where the first two noise-polluting films took place) to Japan, the moviemakers access an eye-popping bento box of cultural motifs to fetishize at 150 mph alongside the pimped-out, turbo-charged rides.
This ain't exactly Lost in Translation, but director Justin Lin has some fun in between the hyper-kinetic set pieces. As Gwen Stefani already knows, Tokyo has a punk-pop-futuristic coolness that clashes cutely with ancient tradition: Harajuku Girls! Steamy Yakitori Stands! Un-gay bathhouses! Macho guys drinking green tea! And the Japanese stereotypically love their high-priced gadgetry-including their cars, hence drift racing. In this actual sub-culture of street racing, drivers must glide their cars at 45 degree-angles around every corner, finessing their breaks and steering wheels to avoid collisions, walls and sheer drops. All about elegance, flow and absolute control to the last millimeter-it's the tai chi of drag racing.
It's also a delicate skill not immediately suited for Sean Boswell (Lucas Black), a hot-rodding American juvenile delinquent sent to Tokyo to live with his father and avoid jail time. Always pickin' for a fight, this yokel stands out with his hairy chest and odd Southern twang (his Dad sounds like Brooklyn to me)-but he'll do anything to race cars again. Good thing his fellow expatriate, Twinkie (Bow Wow, formerly Lil'), takes him to the local parking garage, ground zero of the drift scene. As in the two previous F&F, the race gathering is orgiastic: plasticene, barely-clad chicks coo, their hardware-obsessed thugs rev up and hanger-ons cheer. The Japanese version features more avant-garde fashions, subtler strutting and an excellent mash-up soundtrack of East-meets-West hard rock and hip-hop to lubricate the party.
Aching to burn rubber the local way, Sean immediately encounters a nemesis in "DK" (Drift King), a ruthless mob prince, a sensai in Han (Sung Kang) and a stunning poly-racial love interest in Neela (Nathalie Kelley), attached to DK. As this gaijin (outsider) becomes the Great White Hope to topple the oppressive DK, he strives toward a pristine sense of honor and duty. Here's where the culture-salad gets confusing: is he emulating samurai, John Wayne, a less-ethnic Vin Diesel? Like the film itself, he's a bombastic hodgepodge, too fast, too dim to figure it out.