So there were many festivities this weekend, starting thursday night and ending with a sunday brunch. By sunday afternoon I was done and all I wanted to do was my best broccoli impression on my couch. Sat down, began the impression and saw that The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift was on. Now I will admit something here - it must be a moment of weakness - but I enjoyed the first Fast and Furious, even liked ol’ Vin in it, wasn’t no art piece but I remember being well entertained.

Also, I recently found out (to my great surprise) that Justin Lin directed Tokyo Drift. To sum up: I liked the first one, I loved Justin’s other movie (Better Luck Tomorrow) and I wanted to be a broccoli, so the movie stayed on and I watched it. You, my astute reader, may not be surprised to hear that it really wasn’t very good. It was a mesh of wierd plot jumps, bad philosophizing and not enough good shots of drifting. I mean, it seems to me that you’ve got a pretty good shot at a movie here - fast cars, hot women and Tokyo, right?

I think where it went wrong was that Justin tried to turn it into a deeper movie and kinda failed badly at it. Attempts at developing character fell pretty flat as relationships sprang forth fully fledged without any kinda development, all friendships and enemyships happened literally instantaneously. Too much time was devoted to showing these already developed characterizations (as opposed to developing them). While, I applaud the effort to try and class up the joint, I’d rather have gotten more of the drifting - The Fast and The Furious, as a franchise, is just never going to be a character driven show, if you see what I’m saying.

I liked Sung Kang (Han), I think he’s a good actor, he was good in Better Luck Tomorrow, too. Brian Tee (DK) was decent, too, he did a real good head down, looking out the top of his eyes creepy thing - and it’s funny to see that he was on Buffy and Entourage. Everyone else was eh.

So… in case you were one of the few people deciding whether or not to see it… I think it’s pretty safe to give it a pass.

UPDATE: This guy must’ve watched it at the same time I did and just posted his review, too. Let’s just say, he didn’t really think much of it either. Really, I can sum up the whole movie with just two choice quotes from the review:

There are hot Japanese chicks all over the place. I mean HOT AS HELL. so that part of the movie was the only good part.

Then Vin Diesel shows up at the end like “yeah, lets race” and shit.

And that’s the movie.

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Apr 30th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: movies · review