Justin Lin’s first of four entries in the Fast and the Furious franchise acts as a bridge between the two films that preceded his and the sharply different angle upon which he’d set the series. As in Rob Cohen’s original and John Singleton’s sequel, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift takes place in an underworld lit primarily by the loud paint jobs of illegally modified cars, with an ethnically diverse cast headed by a white guy whose overwhelmingly vanilla presence seems to be an apology to mainstream audiences for all the diversity that somehow crept into their homogenized entertainment.
Tokyo Drift is even worse in that respect than the first two, replacing Paul Walker with a drawling good old boy (Lucas Black) who makes the former lead of the series look as magnetic as a young Brando in comparison. That this walking glob of tapioca is placed in a foreign country where his whiteness stands out even more only serves to make this trait of the early F&F films more troublesome.
Stylistically, however, Lin builds from the the cartoonish, Speed Racer-referencing sequences of John Singleton’s hyperactive 2 Fast 2 Furious. In relocating from L.A. and Miami’s muscle-car drags to Tokyo’s swooning, squealing drift, Lin reflects the change in racing styles with a shift in visual approach. Cohen’s camera-rattling bumpiness and Singleton’s warp-drive blurs of light outside car windows morph into whiplash spirals and gliding arcs. Such touches carry forth past the races, imbuing scenes of people simply milling about with jittery lurches into sped-up motion.
Indeed, Lin’s style pushes the franchise’s direction to its end zone, ably uniting the slickness of its outlaw passion with its most flippantly ostentatious direction. Like Lin’s most recent (and, sadly, final) movie in the series, Tokyo Drift takes place mostly at night. Yet it is one of the brightest of the series, with Tokyo’s nocturnal self often more dazzling than the daytime version, especially in the way it glints off the souped-up cars. The city’s claustrophobic density likewise fits with the racing that occurs within it more fluidly than the American drag races truly reflect the different cities of the first two; Miami and L.A. look different, but the racing remains the same, while drifting seems a direct response to Tokyo’s overcrowded metropolis.
In retrospect, Tokyo Drift is such a strange aberration, set in a future the most recent installment only catches up to with its post-credits stinger, with an all-new cast designed to mark time before Lin’s subsequent reunion of franchise players into what has now become a downright ensemble cast. With Vin Diesel’s cameo at the end, pitched passionately by the director to the actor to set up a return to the franchise and the subsequent arc for its second trilogy, Tokyo Drift can even seem like a demo reel designed to ultimately reorient the series back to its roots.
Even so, and despite Black’s bland presence, the third Fast and the Furious film offers the first glimpse of something truly engaging with this material, allowing Lin’s friend and collaborator Sung Kang to walk away with the film without much effort and hammering home the franchise’s broader themes of noble outlaw codes by transplanting them to an entirely separate group of people from the previous casts.
As a conversation between Sean and love interest Neela (Nathalie Kelley) points out, where someone is from is irrelevant to where they are now, and if the overriding theme of family is never deeply explored in this or any other Fast and the Furious movie, the affirmation of a family earned through respect and loyalty (and therefore more tight-knit than nearly any blood relation in the series) continues to make this destructive property the most unexpectedly positive, uncynical franchise in contemporary blockbuster cinema.
6 thoughts on “Shelf Life: ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’”
There’s moments in that film that were nice to see as I love the Han character. I didn’t care for Lucas Black nor his girlfriend or the villains he were facing as I found them to be bland. The world of drifting though is quite interesting. I’m thinking of doing a marathon next year of the entire Fast and Furious series as I really did like “Fast Five”.
A movie whose basic premise is that women are objects to be won via men racing cars is positive and uncynical. Uh huh.
What you just described isn’t cynicism. Misogyny perhaps.
The two go together just fine.
It’s true that this franchise’s handling of gender pales in comparison to its racial diversity, though this strikes me as an oversimplification. The opening sequence plays on that idea, but makes a joke of it, as their show of macho bullshit only gets everyone hurt. Both Sean and the rich kid (and, really, his girlfriend) are basic and immature and see it all as a game until there are consequences, even if the full extent of those consequences don’t affect those with connections.
And though Neela breaks up with Takashi and ends up with Sean, the movie ultimately isn’t about Sean “winning” her. She becomes symbolic of a new home Sean finds for himself, a place where he feels like he belongs. He doesn’t race DK for Neela but to stay in Tokyo, the implicit meaning being that it has become as much a home for him as it is for his actually Japanese nemesis. To make Neela a metaphor is a reduction of its own kind, albeit one with an unfortunate history in Hollywood stretching back into far older (and greater) movies than this, but the film is aiming for something — God help me — deeper in its throwback affection for a makeshift family unit. I agree completely, however, that this film’s and the rest of the series’ overreliance on women as a symbol of traditional family (especially in context of the markedly untraditional families that emerge in this franchise) is one of the series’ many flaws.
The opening sequence does make a joke out of the idea, but it’s not one that’s refuted particularly well throughout the rest of the movie. The relationship between Neela and Sean also does a lot to screw up the otherwise admirable racial diversity, because it breaks down a little too easily into stereotypes about the sweet demure Asian lady who just needs a nice white knight in shining armor to save her from those creepy Asian dudes who treat her like an object.
It is a tribute to how much I like Sung Kang (and the driving sequences) that I’ve seen this movie as many times as I have, because it’s definitely the low point in the series, gender-wise.