Film Reviews

The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift

• Rating:
• Director: Justin Lin
• Starring: Bow Wow
• Details: US, 104mins, 12A.

As he's getting into one too many scrapes racing his car all over town, Shaun Boswell (Black) is shipped off to his estranged father in Tokyo in an attempt to keep him on the straight and narrow. However, Shaun's appetite for fast cars proves too much of a draw and he soon finds himself racing around the city's underground with the Japanese mafia - the Yakuza. When he crashes a Yakuza member's car while 'drift-racing' (a combination of speed and hairpin turns), Shaun has to pay back the damage he's caused by running 'errands' for the crime syndicate.
Do you remember when summer blockbusters used to be good? Jaws, the original Star Wars trilogy, Close Encounters, E.T. etc all had that Hollywood sheen but still were endearing enough to even the toughest of critics. All that changed in the '80s when producer Don Simpson met Jerry Bruckheimer and invented the 'high concept' movies (movies that can be summed up in one sentence); the other nail in the coffin was the advent of MTV - the music television channel that doesn't play any music. MTV movies, with its snappy editing and vacuous juggernaut plots, seem hell-bent on dragging movies down to same slag heap where they left the music charts (remember when hitting number one was an achievement?) and The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift is the result - poorly acted, badly written films aimed at twelve-year-old boys with A.D.D. With shots that rarely last more than three seconds, lines that seldom exceed five words, everyone acting cooler than cool and dressed impeccably, this is a brain dead movie of the worst kind in that it doesn't say anything about anything. More disappointing than that is the presence of Lucas Black. Black wowed everyone with his mature role in the American Gothic television series and Billy Bob Thornton's Sling Blade but here is reduced to the cringe-worthy bad dialogue that might as well have been: "I wanna race", "You wanna race?" "Let's race" and "We're racing". Avoid.

Review by Gavin Burke