Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift, The - Various Artists > Reviews > More Cliches Than You Can Shake A Stick At

Author's product rating:   

Originality
Lyrics
Quality and consistency of tracks
Value for Money

Advantages:	Some Fancy cars
Disadvantages:	All been done before, poor direction, script and acting

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

After the moderate success of the first 2 movies it seemed almost inevitable that The Fast and The Furious franchise would make a third and hopefully final outing. The first film seemed to have something different, it was a decent concept, with a couple of decent actors and the whole concept worked. The second was no where near as good but at least held a throw back to the first film with the retention of one of the lead characters. From the moment I heard about Tokyo Drift I thought it would be a stage too far, but would I be proved right?

Having been turfed out of a number of schools Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) is shipped off to Tokyo to live with his father. He lives in a pretty run down part of town but Sean soon manages to get himself back into the local illegal racing circuit with the help of his new found friendship with Twinkie (Bow Wow). After destroying one of the local gangs cars in a "drift" race he ends up working for him to repay his debt. Sean needs a way to get the money back for the car he destroyed and starts to race regularly for Han (Sung Kang) to get by.

I must say that although I didn't expect too much from Tokyo Drift it seemed to be even worse than I thought it possible to be. Ok maybe that's a bit of a sweeping statement but apart from the type of racing involved in the film there was absolutely nothing new. The script was packed full of obvious clichés and taglines that you would expect from a 14 year old. It seems to be following the ideas of the original film with the obvious love interest, the best mate who just wants to help him out and the enemy faction who just so happens to be the love interests current partner.

The director Justin Lin takes over for this film and doesn't seem to bring too much to the table. He takes Chris Morgan's script, the man behind cellular, and recreates the first two films in a slightly different way so as you won't notice its any different. It seems to be Lin's first big budget film and although the racing scene's do look quite impressive that's about all that actually does. The filming is almost as clichéd as the script and you can almost guess what's about to happen next. He tries to use close ups and certain shots to create some form of atmosphere but all it seems to succeed in doing is attempting to distract the viewer from realising how bad it actually is.

Of course the script does let the film down as well and it is certainly hard to find any positives with it. The cars do look good but the attention is deflected from them by the totally over the top acting that someone seems to have advised the cast would make it a good film. I felt the overall direction and idea was simply not good enough and there was no way a third Fast and The Furious film should ever have been made. Even the soundtrack, which I found to be a huge part of the previous films, seemed to pass me by without making any impact at all.

The characterisation of the key members of the cast seems to be painfully lacking as well. Lucas Black seems to be the worst lead I could imagine. He doesn't seem to have any charisma and unlike Vin Diesel and Paul Walker just doesn't seem convincing enough to be a lead man. Even a late appearance by Vin Diesel in a fleeting return as Dominic Toretto fails to lift this movie any further than the bargain buckets of your local DVD store.

I would say that even the remainder of the cast were either picked as a safe choice for their roles or didn't fit at all. For instance Bow Wow, or Lil' Bow Wow as he's more commonly known was meant to be the guy who wheeled and dealed and could get anything. His performance was terrible and his whole persona and screen presence just didn't fit the part at all. Of course with a script and direction as poor as this from Morgan and Lin, there is no cast in the world who could have made this into a decent movie.

So what would be my advice to anyone thinking about watching this? Well in simple terms it would be Don't bother. It is a terrible film and if you've seen either of the first two then you can safely say that you've seen this one too, only a lot better. At just over an hour and 40 minutes long this is a movie that is best avoided. The films seem to be following the game modes of computer games like Need For Speed Underground and that could result in a couple more films to follow. My only hope is that someone, somewhere in a studio realises that any more films would be flogging a dead horse and turns down the offer to make anymore!!

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