The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift

The third installment in the "Fast And Furious" street racing movie franchise employs Tokyo's foreign turf and unconventional racing style, called "drifting," to ignite its misfiring narrative. Lucas Black ("Sling Blade") is a not-ready-for-leading-man trouble magnet named Sean Boswell. A car-totaling race between Sean and a lug-headed jock, over the jock's ditzy blonde girlfriend, exiles Sean to live with his ex-military dad in Tokyo rather than face jail time in California. The change of venue hardly keeps Sean away from his racing addiction after he is introduced to Tokyo's underground world of drift racing, wherein modified street cars are used to glide sideways through hairpin turns and switchbacks. The movie continuously stalls and gets jumpstarted by drift race sequences that lose their novelty.
Rated PG-13. 104 mins. (C+) (Three Stars)