The Fast and the Curious Part 3: 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is INCREDIBLY Dumb and Kind of Fun
Before it could return to its home country The Fast and the Furious ventured to Japan for an off-brand but mostly enjoyable sequel
I am embarking on the epic journey that is The Fast and the Curious because I’m writing an article on the entirety of the Fast and the Furious franchise, including its spin-off Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, for Fatherly and want to get the most out of what will be a huge investment in terms of time and energy.
But I would be lying if I said that one of the main motivations for this series is a vague curiosity about the lowest-grossing and most off-brand entry in the series, 2006’s Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
For SEVENTEEN YEARS now at least one brain cell has been devoted to the thought, “I wonder if the Japanese-set Fast and the Furious movie starring Lil Bow Wow and the kid from Sling Blade and Friday Night Lights is any good or not. Drifting looks kinda cool but also kind of stupid.”
I was curious! For over a decade and a half I’ve thought about this dumb movie without ever biting the bullet and seeing for myself if, in fact, the Japanese-set Fast and the Furious movie starring Lil Bow Wow and the kid from Sling Blade and Friday Night Lights was any good or not.
Now that I’ve finally watched The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift I can announce before man and God that the Japanese-set Fast and the Furious movie starring Lil Bow Wow and the kid from Sling Blade and Friday Night Lights is, in fact, almost impressively stupid but also kind of fun. Just as I suspected, drifting is pretty fucking cool and also spectacularly silly.
Is drifting so awesome that it makes you forget that Tokyo Drift doesn’t star Vin Diesel or Paul Walker although one makes a climactic cameo and it’s not necessarily the one you would expect?
No it does not but, at the risk of losing you with highbrow film critic terminology, Tokyo Drift is dumb as shit but also kind of fun even as it very aggressively does not fix the problems with the previous film.
Before jetting off to the South Pacific The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift opens with the franchise once again adorably trying to convince us that a handsome white goober is an intimidatingly awesome, speed-addicted badass and not just some guy.
Lucas Black stars as Sean Boswell, a juvenile delinquent whose big mouth and bad attitude keeps getting him into scrapes that force him and his long-suffering mother to have to skip town.
Sean proves his bona fides by challenging jock Clay (Home Improvement’s Zachery Ty Brian) to a race. Clay isn’t interested in Sean’s lemon so his girlfriend Cindy (Nikki Griffin) proposes some unique stakes for the race.
The foxy teenager offers herself up to the winner of the race. I’m not sure if this means that if Sean wins she’ll become his sex slave or his girlfriend, or some combination of the two but I do know that if Sean had won, and ended up with Cindy, they would have one hell of a story to tell their grandchildren about how they met and ended up with each other.
In what can only be deemed an apogee of the art of cinema, the set-piece where Sean and Clay nearly kill themselves and each other is set to Kid Rock’s “Bawitaba.”
Tokyo Drift is full of fun but it’s never as transcendently tacky or gloriously vulgar as it is when white American dumbasses are pushing themselves to the limit to the iconically idiotic sounds of Kid Rock's most irresistible anthem.
The authorities are not amused by Sean’s vehicular antics so he is sent to Tokyo to live with his father. In Japan the cocky teenager with the lazy drawl discovers the glamorous, exciting world of Drifting, where thrill-seekers deliberately over-steer in a way that pushes them sideways as well as forward.
In Tokyo Sean quickly befriends Twinkie (Shad Moss, AKA Bow Wow, AKA Lil Bow Wow), a fast-talking, baby-faced hustler who, in the franchise’s grand tradition, is nowhere near as cool or charismatic or funny as he is supposed to be.
He’s introduced trying to sell some possibly bootleg Air Jordans to his American classmate by asking, “You like Michael Jordan? I LOVE Michael Jordan.” Bow Wow stops just short of turning to the camera and winking to broadcast that he just delivered an inside joke because his breakthrough motion picture was called Like Mike and was about a young man played by Bow Wow who not only liked Michael Jordan but possessed magical shoes that allowed him to play as well as the NBA legend.
When Sean discovers the underground world of drifting he is amazed and transfixed. He almost instantly makes an enemy out of Takashi (Brian Tee), AKA D.K for Drift King, who rules the drift scene alongside his sexy outsider girlfriend Neela (Nathalie Kelley).
Sean befriends or romances his school’s only non-Japanese students but he also forms a pragmatic partnership with Takashi’s business partner, the cooly enigmatic Han Lue (Sung Kang). If The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift was a test only Kang passed it because while his costars were relegated to brief appearances in F9, Kang made it into the family and has appeared in almost every subsequent sequel.
The Fast and the Furious cast seems evenly split between actors who are nowhere near as cool as they’re supposed to be and icons who are appropriately badass. Kang falls into the second category. He understands that nothing is less cool than trying to be cool. So he is laconic and understated.
The franchise liked Kang’s laid-back energy so much that they brought him back repeatedly despite his character CLEARLY DYING HERE in a fiery crash after first teaching Sean everything he knows about drifting.
Yes, The Fast and the Furious is one of those wonderful movies where a white hero enters an intimidating non-white world he knows almost nothing about and, after some training, almost instantly becomes better than everyone else.
Sean woos Neela while diligently training to defeat D.K. in a winner-takes-all battle for supremacy on the streets. D.K. is revered and feared for his drag racing gifts but also for his connection with the Yakuza. D.K is the nephew of Kamata (Sonny Chiba), a bigwig in the organized crime community.
Chiba receives the iconic treatment. Unlike Bow Wow, Lucas Black or Tyrese Gibson, Chiba deserves the iconic treatment in that he is a genuine international icon and not just an extremely handsome man who was thrust into central role in the series because Vin Diesel was briefly too big and too popular to grace the franchise that made him big and popular with his excessively masculine presence.
Director Justin Lin had worked with Kang on the much buzzed about 2002 drama Better Luck Tomorrow, where he played the same character he does here, making that movie his origin story in the process.
Lin is a solid craftsman who comes alive during racing sequences that are a neon blur of speed, excitement and adrenaline then naps soundly during the regrettable scenes involving people talking and not driving way too fast and way too recklessly.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is at its tacky best when it embraces its plastic MTV soul and gives itself over to the bonehead majesty of thrill seekers putting it all on the line set to a gloriously, painfully 2006 soundtrack that combines Hip Hop, Reggaeton, pop and techno.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift depicts the Tokyo drag racing scene as fundamentally the same as the ones found in Los Angeles and Miami. They’re all full of hip, muscular men with attitude with scantily clad women in mini-skirts on their arms and in their cars.
Judging by the Fast and the Furious franchise it’s apparently against the rules for women to wear pants in the drag-racing scene or to play a role that is not purely ornamental.
After desperately missing Diesel for pretty much its entirety, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift brings Dom back at the very end to race Sean.
It’s all about family and speed and honoring the somehow non-dead Han’s confused legacy. It’s cheesy as fuck but it works all the same because Tokyo Drift’s greatest asset is that it’s cheesy as fuck and kind of fun if you’re not expecting too much and set your expectations accordingly.
Next up is 2009’s Fast & Furious and the return of Dom and Brian. If I remember correctly, the film has a strong family theme, so we’ve got that to look forward to!
So stock up on Corona and strap in because this is going to be one hell of a ride!
And after drifting away from the FAST & FURIOUS franchise, Lucas Black went to N'awlins so he could be mentored by the FIRST Captain of the ENTERPRISE, Jonathan Archer!