The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Rob Cohen’s original struck a chord with its B-movie thrills, souped-up cars and unique visual effects. If 2003’s follow-up, ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’, was considered a lazy cash-in on the franchise, then where does that leave this vacuous non-event? Drifting, for the uninitiated, is a balletic style of racing that involves driving cars around corners fast enough for the tail to stick out at right angles. It’s an impressive spectacle and indeed the only redeeming feature of this aimless farrago. Lucas Black plays a 17-year-old street-racer sent to Tokyo to live with his divorced father. On arrival, he meets Neela, who turns out to be the girlfriend of Tokyo’s best drifter, DK (Brian Tee), nephew of a comic strip-style yakuza boss. So, all the correct ingredients for a petrol-headed geezer-flick then: fast cars, crunching metal, pretty chicks, the odd punch-up and a loud rap soundtrack. True, it tries to be tongue-in-cheek, but really it’s just cheek.