The Fast and the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift
About the ``Tokyo Drift" in that subtitle of the latest installment of ``The Fast and the Furious": What is it?
Sounds like an environmental crisis or a nightclub craze. Really, it's just a game race cars play -- like demolition derby where drivers are challenged not to demolish anything.
The cars only flirt with destruction. And the movie only flirts with entertainment.
Taking over for Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, and Tyrese, the missing stars of the first two movies, is Lucas Black, an Alabaman who is half their size but twice their seriousness. He drives with all his might.
Black plays Sean Boswell, a nomadic high schooler with a bracing Southern drawl and a felonious addiction to speeding. At his brand new school, Sean gets into a fight with the cocky blond jock before the movie even firmly establishes what his archetype is. They settle their beef with a race whose prize is the jock's dumb blond girlfriend.
She's not worth it, but they're off anyway. Property is damaged, faces are bloodied, and the law comes down on Sean. To save him from juvie he's shipped to Tokyo to live with his negligent Navy dad (Brian Goodman), who forbids him from going near a car. Nice try.
A fellow American (Bow Wow, playing a cornrowed gearhead named Twinkie) brings Sean underground into the city's drift culture, whose kids congregate in massive parking garages where every night appears to be Friday night. Because the movie's three screenwriters appear to lack any imagination about plot -- and women -- Sean finds himself right back where he started in his last school: the bully's vamp girlfriend, Neela (Nathalie Kelley), has the hots for him.
There's a rub this time. D.K. (Brian Tee), the cool Tokyo toughie, is a yakuza, and he wants to drift against Sean, who knows only how to drive like a Duke out of Hazzard.
His first race is a flop, but Han (Sung Kang), the kid who loans him his car, agrees to teach him the right moves in time for the climactic showdown. In the meantime, there are fistfights, indigestibly deplorable dialogue, comely dudes and chicks for the camera to ogle, and an impressive cross-section of hip-hop and Japanese rock that helps pass the time.
Oh, and Sonny Chiba, as a cigarillo-chomping gangster. The martial-arts star's mock-menacing performance is the only one you couldn't mistake for lumber.
``Tokyo Drift" does give us a Tokyo mostly unsullied by the American cultural indifference that makes Sofia Coppola's ``Lost in Translation" exasperating with repeat viewings. Director Justin Lin uses the city as a touristy backdrop, but he doesn't turn it into a hipster's freak show either -- although I was disappointed that the sea of Harajuku girls never parted to reveal a Gwen Stefani number.
This Tokyo is even a more convincing melting pot than the all-white American high school we see earlier. The best thing about these ``Fast and Furious" movies is the uncommon way they take the multiracial and the multicultural for granted.
Lin also manages to make explicit what the previous two installments merely implied. The ``F&F" series is the 21st century's beach movie, one for some beachless future world where the kids are crowning 25 and seem capable of living off of hair gel and exhaust fumes. The car races stand in for the musical numbers; they're just as dopey and underwhelming. And even though no one here is as charismatic as Frankie and Annette, everybody appears to be having as much fun.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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