Director: Justin Lin
The following review contains spoilers… for a 15 year old movie.
Many films are spewed out by gargantuan studios to churn out some blockbuster cash, and others made by indie studios or standalone producers to fill a niche within the world of movies. Some are lucky and when released, shape the current zeitgeist.
Tokyo Drift is weird. Widely known for its title song, the movie falls in the mediocre fast and furious action flick category — it only gets a 3.5/5 because of the iconic Teriyaki Boyz banger.
Lucas Black as Sean Boswell stars as a seventeen year old reckless boy who cannot find himself out of trouble — driving cars? I don’t know, I feel like the substance of his run ins with the law is pretty stupid, but we are talking about Fast and Furious so not behind its league.
Nathalie Kelley takes on the role of Neela, the archetypical girl who’s stuck with the villain (Takashi) because of familial tragedy. I’ll give props to how they portray her relative power dynamic to other characters she interacts with, as she does intimidate and emanate a lot of confidence/experience (on cars, obviously). Also, Nathalie Kelley is a pretty cool person, fighting for indigenous rights in SoCal and beyond.
Brian Tee who is Takashi, known as DK (not in the end though), has one of the best intro scenes in my experience of watching cinema. I think it’s because of the opening beat to Tokyo Drift as he swiftly drives down ramps of a parking garage as hundreds of race goers watch. His role as a nephew of a Yakuza boss is quite refreshing, as although the skeleton of the plot line feels reused, the chassis of Tokyo and crime adds new flavor to the smoothly-paced movie.
Sung Kang reprises his role as Han, originally seen in Better Luck Tomorrow, who serves as The Mentor for Sean, albeit foolishly because of his faith put into Boswell’s amateur driving. I say that because Sean completely wrecks his prized ‘Mona Lisa’ 5 minutes after the first time they meet. He’s cool about it thought, which is interesting (his reasoning is he sees potential, which does work out in the end! After his death…)
I did notice, or at least it feels as if the camera shakiness differed in correlation to the skill of the driver when drifting. In the first race between Takashi and Sean, you can clearly see the bobbing of the shot as Sean careens and crashes into pillars in the garage, while the camera smoothly follows Takashi’s experienced drifts. On DK’s mountain *which has to be on purpose because Japan… D(onkey) K(ong)* Sean’s driving has considerably improved and so does the camera shot as it follows him duke it out with Takashi to stay in Tokyo.
Takashi dies? I have no clue, he just crashes off the mountain and Sean’s crew all cheers for him. The movie’s a little weird in that sense.
There’s also a Japanese character with a caricature-like British accent. I don’t know what to make of it, maybe Justin Lin knows why he sounded so cartoonish.
Not a bad movie overall, the song definitely leaped the movie past 3 stars just because I listen to it monthly.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed my review of the 3rd installment in the Fast and Furious franchise.
Image creds: Flxt.Tmsimg.Com, 2021, https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p159790_p_v10_an.jpg. Accessed 2 June 2021.
(I used the alternate poster for the movie because the original looks bleached and ugly, like it was deep fried or something)
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