Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
Underdog street racer Sean Boswell (Lucas Black, left) and his buddy Twinkie (Bow Wow) in Twinkie's '06 VW Van Touran Custom. - CONTRIBUTED
THE FAST and the Furious franchise continues with the latest instalment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. This version is directed by Justin Lin (Annapolis) and written by Chris Morgan (Cellular).
The stars of the original, Paul Walker and Vin Diesel (who does a cameo), have both moved on and that's always a bad sign, when even the originals have abandoned ship.
So maybe it really is not so surprising that by half-way through the film one realises that it is going nowhere and it is not getting there fast enough; that may, of course, make some fans quite furious.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is easily the worst of the three, and given how Too Fast Too Furious limped along, that is quite a tragic state to be in. Tokyo Drift is, unfortunately, quite aptly named because for the most part the movie merely drifts along.
Its dilemma was not helped by the fact that on Wednesday night the Palace Cineplex was having much technical difficulty, which dampened The Fast and The Furious strategy, which is play the music and the car sounds so loud that the noise squeezes out sound and viewers cannot actually tell if they are enjoying themselves. The loud rock and rap music that usually accompanies the film is a significant part of what has made the previous films tolerable. If the plot does not drive it, the music and the cars do.
DRIFTING.
To be honest, not even the first film was strong on either plot or performance. Diesel brought a bit of grit; the plot was borrowed from Point Break (Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves), shifting from surfing to race cars. That flick had the coolest driving stunts of the lot and so there was enough energy to sustain the film. And, they played the music really loud.
Tokyo Drift features Lucas Black (Friday Night Lights) as Shaun Boswell. Black has therefore taken over the role of the brash young American from Paul Walker. Boswell leaves the United States to go and live with his father in Tokyo in an attempt to escape a jail sentence. Of course, when he gets there he falls into the same behaviour, which got him shipped from his home country, as he falls into the world of drifting.
Interestingly, seeing Black in this role has the unsettling sense of déjà vu, as his predecessor, Walker had also first done a football film (Varsity Blues), then The Fast and the Furious.
The film also features Bow Wow (Twinkie), Nathalie Kelley (Neela) Sung Kang (Han), Brian Tee (Drift King). Kelly is a great representative of the women in this film. She is mere decoration. Several of the crowd shots in the film are just an orgy of female flesh and in many cases the camera simply crops off their heads as they strut and bend over cars or wiggle around.
The movie would probably have been more interesting if the cars had got a chance to display as much of their wares as the women did. Unfortunately, Lin waits until the end to amp up the directing and pump some Nitrous Oxide into the camera work to make the last race interesting.
Alas, by then the movie has long drifted along to nowhere. The plot is inane; the characters are uninteresting. The cars are still pretty, but they are unable to save the film from drifting along into inanity.
