THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT

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Gliding and Falling
Car Racing Franchise Skids More Than It Coasts 
By Cole Smithey

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.

Not-ready-for-leading-man Lucas Black plays trouble magnet 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. Here, modified street cars are used to glide sideways through hairpin turns and switchbacks. The movie continuously stalls and gets jumpstarted by drift race sequences whose novelty quickly wears off.

Padded with relatively unknown actors, "Tokyo Drift" is more of an actors' showcase than fully fleshed-out movie. You can spot the young actors in scenes that leave little doubt about which ones hold the screen better. To this end, the movie starts out at a deficit with Lucas Black unable to fill Paul Walker's shoes from the previous two "Fast And Furious" chapters. Black's signature southern accent comes off more as a personal crutch for the young actor, than as an integral aspect of Sean's character.

The drawl makes for some internationally expressed contempt for Sean's American "cowboy" persona, but it also snaps you out of the movie every time Black opens his mouth. Lucas Black squanders the opportunity to step outside of his typical typecasting as a southern refugee. He merely reinforces an idea that he is ill-equipped as an actor to do a straight American (i.e. nondescript Californian) accent. 

Bow Wow ("Johnson Family Vacation") is the second actor to fall under the rubber-burning wheels of the story as Twinkie, a street-hustling ex-pat student at the same Japanese prep school as Sean. For most of the movie, Bow Wow's character seems as if he showed up for work on the wrong movie set. He's never believable as an ex-pat kid attempting to digest Japan's cultural differences, much less someone who has already attained a significant degree of cross-cultural competency.

Still, there are a few commanding performances that spice up the movie. Sung Kang ("Better Luck Tomorrow") plays Han, a close cohort to the film's mafia-associated antagonist and drift racing master D.K. (Brian Tee). Han sets the story into motion when he loans his treasured "Mona Lisa," a '01 Nissan Silvia S15, to drift racing novice Sean so he can compete against D.K. [Drift King] at a late night parking deck rally. Sean trashes Han's car during the race and unintentionally puts himself in Han's indentured service. Sung Kang exemplifies a quicksilver brand of intellectual complexity that keeps you guessing about Han even when the story turns its focus away. More than any other actor in the film, Kang elicits a realm of dramatic tension that helps bind the action.

Then there's the exotic charm of newcomer Nathalie Kelley as D.K.'s fickle girlfriend Neela. Born in Peru and raised in Australia, Kelley exudes a worldly charisma and haunting sexuality that threatens to overtake the movie whenever she's onscreen. Neela floats back and forth between the affections of D.K. and Sean like a cat with equal affinity for two owners. Neither Sean nor D.K. is fit to possess Neela, and so we root for her independence if only to observe her longer. Nathalie Kelley doesn't just steal scenes, she hijacks the movie and holds it ransom. It's tough to take the filmmakers' insistence on the importance of car racing seriously with this kind of competition around. Nathalie Kelley could just be the next big thing.

Rated PG-13. 104 mins.