The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift

The third sequel in most franchises is generally the tipping point into despair. Most of them are little more than cluttered noise gnawing away at a threadbare narrative, with the hope that advancements in special effects will cover up the producer’s flop sweat. With the exception of At World’s End, several recently released three-quels bear this rule out. Like this year, last year’s summer season also saw a lone, surprising exemption to this trend: The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift.

The first Fast And The Furious was an over-blown B-movie with meatheaded charms. Vin Diesel chewed his way through dialogue like “I live my life a quarter mile at a time” as if he had just swallowed a torque wrench. It was impossible to take seriously, but boasted a genuine love of fast cars and raw, thrilling speed. The sequel, the inanely titled 2 Fast, 2 Furious, was unwatchable silliness and everyone attached to it should be embarrassed by their participation. Unfortunately, it also made fistfuls of money, which guaranteed another sequel.

A couple of inspired decisions saved Tokyo Drift from becoming another cynical exercise in fleecing the audience. One, letting relative newcomer Justin Lin direct; and two, substituting real, high-performance driving for the usual computer-generated effects. Lin doesn’t direct with the nervous desperation of a nascent director trying not to fail; instead he infuses the entire project with enthusiasm and a giddy sense of glee. The driving sequences are less spectacular than the monster mash-ups that spend the summer rampaging across cinema screens, but they feel far more engaging and intimate than anything a Michael Bay clone has yet to cut together. The whole affair is not just enjoyable, it marks the passage of the director from indie filmmaker to “director to watch” status.

In Tokyo Drift, Lucas Black plays Sean Boswell, a high school student who totals his car in an illegal street race. To avoid jail, he is sent to live with his father who is in the military in Japan. Wasting no time, he quickly falls into an underworld of Japanese gangsters and drift racing. Drifting isn’t straight-forward, raw power NASCAR racing, it’s a specialized, finesse use of power to slide the car around hairpin turns.

Instead of following the mold of the first two films, with their progressively more complicated plotting, Tokyo Drift strips the story down to the chassis and rebuilds itself as a lean, nimble tale that can take the corners with ease. Instead of overpowering the audience with complexity, it tunes up the basic, old-school western B-movie formula, transposing it to a world of Tokyo street racing.

Highly tuned sports cars replace guns, and Sean quickly learns that his lead-footed method of winning races is a quick route to embarrassment. He gets taken in by Han (Sung Kang, who exudes cool on the level of the French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo), and is gradually mentored in the ways of drift racing. The story doesn’t break any new ground, but instead of re-inventing the wheel, Tokyo Drift puts the pedal to the metal. The good guys have grit and wisdom, the bad guys glower like they need a greasy mustache and a cheroot, and the dame looks damn good in a schoolgirl mini-skirt.

Simplicity becomes strength here. In an era where movies have turned the impossible into the digitally mundane, sleek cars actually performing dangerous stunts at high speeds becomes the ultimate special effect. The driving sequences have an astonishing heft and are refreshingly dialogue-free. We get to luxuriate in the power and glorious noise of a high-performance engine without being bombarded by cheap one liners. The film also captures a tactile, awe-inspiring reverence for precision driving and the thrill of having an obscene amount of horsepower at your command.

The high point of the action scenes is a cleverly foreshadowed and beautifully executed skid through a famously crowded Shibuya intersection – Tokyo’s answer to Times Square. It is both beautiful and harrowing when in the midst of a chase, the action suddenly barrels straight at a massive crowd. Without resorting to a clichéd slow-motion shots, and using taut editing with seamless effects work, the crowds part like the Red Sea while two cars drift around the intersection, giving you the sense of two tons of high-performance steel floating inches away from a fragile mass of humanity. There are precious few shots in action sequences that stand out so boldly without throwing the whole sequence out of whack, and this is one of the most memorable in recent years.

What’s plainly evident in Tokyo Drift is that Justin Lin is a nimble director, and so far, he seems reasonably free from the ego-driven limitations of his more famous peers. Beyond the action sequences, he deftly captures the mystery and quirkiness of Tokyo without flattening it into a Hollywood clash of cultural stereotypes. With crowded streets, pachinko parlors, neon lights, and vending machines; Lin captures a cinematic Tokyo in the same vibrant way Spike Lee captures New York City.

More importantly, Lin coaxes watchable performances from mediocre actors like Black, and the ex-rapper Bow Wow, and he gets a masterful performance out of Sung Kang. Kang appeared in Lin’s first film, Better Luck Tomorrow, and perhaps it’s his rapport with Lin that is paying off; here he simply owns the screen. Like the director, Kang is a talent to watch for, and you can only hope he’ll find more vehicles that suit his charisma.

Lin’s next picture is in limbo at the moment. It’s an independently produced comedy set in the 1970’s called Finishing The Game, and hopefully it will see theatrical distribution this year. I really want to see Lin keep working, and get his hands on some material that will really stretch his wings. For now, he’s made my list of directors with a free pass on his next couple of movies, and more importantly, he’s on the top of my list to see what he’ll do next.