The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift

The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

Runtime: 104 minutes

Directed by: Justin Lin

Starring: Lucas Black, Bow Wow, Sung Kang, Brian Tee, Nathalie Kelley

From: Universal

As I figured this movie would tie into Furious 7 (I understand that it does aside from the obvious death of Han and its repercussions) I figured it was about time I saw this. It has its fans and I do not understand why. I explain my feelinngs below in my review copied over from Letterboxd and I'll return Sunday afternoon with a new review; maybe it'll be of Furious 7 and maybe it won't; I've heard some things about it that are cause for concern so maybe I'll wait a few days to see it.

Even though I rate the last two films in the F&F franchise rather highly, last night was the first time I had seen this motion picture, despite it having plenty of fans all over the Internet. With the strange chronology of this franchise this actually comes after Fast & Furious 6 so maybe it's appropriate that I waited to see this until now.

In short, I didn't hate this because this is the outlier of the franchise, something barely related to the rest of the films. I hate it because it's an awful motion picture. Lucas Black plays Sean, a 17 year old who's an asshat that always gets into trouble due to racing. After getting into trouble dueling with the oldest kid from Home Improvement (that guy being a jock quarterback, I found it quite amusing), he gets sent to Japan to love with his military father, where... he continues racing and he never learns any valuable lessons or changes his ways. Despite being a racer he has no idea what drifting is; he tries to do it and eventually becomes a drifting king.

While there's some interesting racing scenes this was pretty difficult for me to get through. There's barely a plot, and what you see is a rehash of The Karate Kid Part II. A bunch of stuff happens, there's of course a romance, a final race, the end. Sonny Chiba is barely in it so that was lame and so was the CGI, but its biggest sin is that I hated most of the characters; they were just awful at worst and lousy at best. Our alleged “heroes” are actually asstagonists who I usually couldn't stand. I certainly didn't like the lead who constantly disobeyed his dad and barely gets punished for doing so.

The character named TWINKIE (played by Bow Wow!) is a punk who illegally sells items and even franchise favorite Han is an ass as he rips off his partner. I have no idea why Han became popular due to this role. It has nothing to do with the performance of Sung Kang and everything to do with Han being a blank character who sometimes utters phrases that are supposed to be wise but are actually hackneyed nonsense. I just don't get it...

At least the later films did try to tie their plots to this and that was successful. This actual movie was not a success at all, aside from the racing and the ability to look at the Tokyo scenery, which I like doing but there are many better ways for me to do that. If others love this that is OK; at least now I can say I've seen it... and never need to see it ever again.