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The Squeal World

Let's be honest, those of us who go to see racing movies know what to expect. Racing movies are like musicals or martial arts movies - just substitute racing scenes for streets fights or musical numbers. Obviously, I couldn't tell you that "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" - the third in the franchise after the aggressively awful "2 Fast 2 Furious" - is a good movie and still retain what little cred I might have as a critic. But I will say that as a racing movie, "Tokyo Drift" (or "3 Fast 3 Furious", as I like to call it) delivers the goods. Whenever the script starts to drift too far into dialogue, "Tokyo" squeals back into the fast lane.

Perhaps learning from "2 Fast", director Justin Lin, who wrote and directed the wonderful "Better Luck Tomorrow", dispenses with formalities and puts the rubber to the road almost immediately. No sooner does the film begin than our hero, rebellious teen Shawn Boswell (Lucas Black), finds himself in a race against a rich jock in his Daddy's Dodge Viper. Mr. Lin has a surprising instinct for this material, filming the race scenes with a visceral you-are-there immediacy that keeps the tension high. When Shawn's race ends badly he is shipped off to Tokyo because…well… oh, look, another race!

Shawn shows a remarkable adaptability, getting involved in the illegal street racing underworld less than 24 hours after landing in Japan. Once on the scene, he makes the mistake of flirting with the mysteriously-accented Neela (Nathalie Kelley) who's the girlfriend of - wouldn't you know it? - the best racer in Tokyo, nicknamed "D.K". The D.K. stands for "Drift King". Why a Japanese racer has a nickname which is an abbreviation for English words is because… oh look, more racing!

And that's about how it goes. Leading, of course, to the "big race". But "Tokyo Drift" is not about just any kind of racing. This film deals specifically in a style called "drifting", which can more or less be summed up as skidding around turns. This ensures that there are plenty of squealing tires on the soundtrack, though after a while I really missed seeing a car drive straight.

With the exception of Bow Wow - who wisely chose to play a comic relief rather than stand front and center - Mr. Lin has managed to cast some of the least charismatic actors I've seen in a long time. Mr. Black is an adequate stand-in for Paul Walker (though he's about as 17 years old as I am) but there is so little chemistry between Ms. Kelley and anyone else on screen that you actually don't want to see Mr. Black win her in the end. The Asian actors fare slightly better, particularly Brian Tee as D.K. The filmmakers also manage to drum up none other than martial arts mainstay Sonny Chiba as the Yakuza boss (and, yes, there had to be Yakuza in the film).

Losing Vin Diesel after "The Fast and the Furious", and now without Paul Walker, the only tie-in between the three films is the cars themselves. Which is fine since the cars have as much, if not more personality than the actors. Witness this wonderful bit of character development:

SHAWN: Where are you from?
NEELA: Does it matter?

Not to this script, which is, amazingly, credited to no fewer than three writers. The film paints a picture of Tokyo as a non-stop party, full of the kind of buxom models you see in Hip Hop videos, but with a slight Asian flavor to them in this case. One might say it's a "return to form" for the franchise, though it wasn't in particularly good shape to begin with. While the films are still fast, the only thing furious might be the audience after paying $10 for this.