Summer Movie Olympics, Part 7: Exploitation At It's Best

I went up to the bay area for the fourth of July and had a pretty great weekend with my family. My little sister is taking a sign language class for summer school (and I'll stop you right there before you think she's doing it selflessly- if she takes two years of sign language, she can pass out of all language classes through college.) As a requirement for her class, she had to attend a movie with open captioning- as it turned out, the weekend we were in town a local theatre was showing "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" on Sunday morning with captions for the hearing impaired. I jumped at the chance to see the latest "F&F" film, as I had seen the first two before it. Though "2 Fast, 2 Furious" is a boring and lame sequel, I loved the over the top ridiculousity of the first movie. And who could resist seeing "Tokyo Drift" in such a surreal screening environment? But captioning a movie like this does make a certain amount of sense- the dialouge doesn't exactly matter in these movies anyway, so why not show this for hearing impaired audiences? Maybe "Fast and the Furious 4" will not have any dialouge at all. The kids who flock to these movies on their opening weekends (and flock they do- "Tokyo Drift" made $24 million on it's first weekend- not bad for a movie with no sequel without the original stars, or any name actors at all,) won't even realize they've seen an experimental film.

Nobody in the audience for these movies gives a shit that the stars of the first two "F&F" films are totally absent, (except for a surprise cameo at the end of the movie.) The movies are all about fast cars, dangerous races, insane crashes, hot girls, and all around cheap thrills. The franchise has developed into a series of B-Movies put out by an A-List studio- this is the kind of thing Roger Corman used to thrive at. "Tokyo Drift" is loud, stupid, and features an actor who probably has less charisma than the boring as a brick Paul Walker (who starred in the firs two "Fast and the Furious" films,) and the storyline is beyond generic. But I'll be damned if I didn't love almost every minute of this movie.

The story really is of minimal importance in a movie like this- Lucas Black plays Sean, a troubled American kid who is shipped off to live with his strict millitarry father. He gets involved in an underground racing scene, falls in love with the girlfriend of a wanna-be Yakuza member, befriends a small time criminal, and becomes an expert at "drift" style racing in order to beat his rival and win the girl. A conflict that could have ended in violence is, as customary in these movies, settled with a race. The script is silly and riddled with cliches, but in a knowing enough way that it's easy to laugh along with it and just enjoy the ride. Sometimes the movie is funny on purpose, and sometimes it's unintentionally hillarious- but either way I was laughing and having a good time, and that's more than I can say for a lot of the big, bloated Hollywood offering this summer.

Despite the fact that Black is an unbelievabley wooden leading man, and that the rest of the cast (including the artist formerly known as Lil' Bow Wow,) can't act their way out of paper bags, the movie still zips along entertainingly. The real stars of the film are not the people anyway- the cars in "Fast and the Furious" movies are framed as lovingly as the lead characters of a certain recent animated movie about talking automobiles.

I had a blast for most of this movie- the races were stylish and fun for the most part, and it's just in my DNA as a guy to watch those cars drift around impossible curves and just think "wow, that was fucking cool." My only real complaint is that the movie does wear out it's welcome a bit before the big final race. With such a who gives a fuck story being told, why did it still take almost a full two hours to tell it?

Other than the ten minutes that could have been cut out to make it a bit leaner, "Tokyo Drift" pretty much delivers the goods. Sometimes all a summer movie needs is a few good races and a bunch of cool crashes to satisfy that summer movie itch.