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dir: Justin Lin
Look! Cars going fast
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, could actually be an enjoyable film. Honestly, it could be, stranger things have happened. However, I am uniquely incapable of being able to assess if that is actually the case.

I would need to consume some magical kind of potion that would strip me of over twenty years of my life and about fifty or so IQ points in order to be able to judge the film on its merits. To say the movie is aimed at fourteen-year-old boys, or people with the brains of fourteen-year-old boys is an insult to, you guessed it, fourteen-year-old boys. I’m sure there are teenagers that will watch this and think, “damn, that’s a condescending film.”

It panders to a mindlessly immature mentality in a way only a movie produced by older adults with contempt for teenagers can. It’s with this kind of marketing mentality that Tokyo Drift was prematurely ejaculated onto screens worldwide in another desperate to milk teenagers out of their crack money.

The values expressed in this flick amount to this: winning in any contest is about proving you’re better than anyone else, and any woman, or teenage girl’s worth is judged solely by whether she can be put up as a prize in a contest. Not once, not twice but thrice women are the actual prize in a racing contest. There is this lazy, aimless air of rebellion that can’t be confused with anything connected to stuff like Rebel Without a Cause or Catcher in the Rye.

Trying to avoid the ‘adult’ tone of the first two flicks, Tokyo Drift focuses its attentions on the unbelievable adventures of the oldest looking teenager in America. Lucas Black, who most people might remember as the strange Southern kid in American Gothic, or the strange Southern kid in Sling Blade, or the strange Southern kid in everything he’s ever played, plays Sean, the petrol-head product of a broken home who can’t stay out of trouble.

Though he looks old enough to have fathered some of the girls he is paired up with in the flick, he plays a teenager somehow deported out of the States to Japan because of trouble with the law. In Japan, he miraculously contrives to find a pocket of Tokyo where everyone he interacts with is American, Australian or Korean. He even has an African-American sidekick called Twinkie (rapper Bow Wow ). Twinkie clearly doesn’t know that his nickname is slang for gay jailbait, otherwise we would imagine that Bow Wow’s handlers would have gotten involved, and hilarity would have ensued.

Sean lives for racing, and magically, despite having no clue as to how to race in Japan, where the cars are those hotted-up neon monstrosities you often see hooning around Chinatowns the world over, he somehow falls in the right-wrong racing crew when he comes to the attention of a local hustler, Han. Han is also an Asian-American over in Japan for nebulous reasons. But he does have a magical bucket of money and a stable of cars, thus facilitating Our Hero’s ability to race against the locals.

He makes an enemy of DK, the Drift King (Brian Tee), who does little more than sneer down his flat nose at Our Okie Hero Sean. Every film needs an enemy, and in a film where the hero is an American in Japan, not only is the enemy going to be a resentful and racist Japanese guy (played by a Korean), but he’s going to have to be involved with the yakuza. Because surely the yakuza have nothing better to do than be concerned with the fortunes of teenage Americans with the temerity to live in Japan.

If you can think of any arbitrary and idiotic reasons why the film would end up hinging on a climactic race where everything will be decided by its last second outcome, please send those reasons to the screenwriters of this flick, because they were clearly out of ideas. There’s no championship race in underground racing at the end of the season, there’s just people driving around in car parks and sliding all over the place in their amusing cars.

There are some tolerable scenes of dialogue in the film. Honestly. Some of the scenes between Sean and his father (Brian Goodman), who’s a Navy guy stationed in Japan for reasons never explained, and between Sean and Han (Sung Kang), are okay. During scenes between Sean and the love interest (Nathalie Kelley), I could hear something like the sound of crickets chirping and the rustle of rolling tumbleweeds in the background. Impact drills and cars loudly going broom broom would have been more pleasant on the ear otherwise than listening to that girl and Our Hero talk.

The script is a tortured mess of mangled concepts, deranged motivations and mystical anti-logic, but, honestly, no-one’s gone along to a flick like this or rented it on DVD expecting a Chekhov play. They’re here for the racing, which, really, the film doesn’t do that well either. Which is an added spit in your eye.

Sure, it’s thrilling to watch a car go fast. It’s not so thrilling to watch a car in half-second fragments sliding around obstacles in a carpark. Of the races on show, only one really sticks out as being well done, being a street race where DK, which stands not for Drift King but for Dickhead King-size, chases people around wanting to kill them. You know, because that would be, um, cool.

For all that it is set in Japan, precious little of anything needed to be set there. I wouldn’t have been surprised or offended if they’d filmed it in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and pretended it was Tokyo. For what little they say or represent about Japan, its culture or its people, you’d think the Tokyo of the title was more of a brand name than a city.

The only recognisable Japanese people in it, apart from a tasteless and shameful cameo by Sonny Chiba, are perky jailbait Japanese teenage girls wearing less clothing than one of the Hilton sisters and standing around like attractive furniture dumber than either of the Hilton sisters.

I don’t really blame director Justin Lin. With a flick like this, with only the indie flick Better Luck Tomorrow under his belt, he would have been shouldered aside by many idiot producers talking down to an audience they believe is comprised of idiots. All he did was talk to the actors occasionally before getting them to mutter atrocious dialogue and made sure they had enough fresh fruit in their trailers.

I guess it could still be entertaining, to very drunk people. But it would have to be a king hell kind of drunk, involving moonshine and cleaning products. Regular drunks couldn’t be drunk enough to mistake this for a mediocre flick.

3 reasons having your head run over is more enjoyable than watching this flick out of 10

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“Life's simple, you make choices and you don't look back” – the wit and wisdom of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.