Fred Kolb’s review published on Letterboxd:
No need to sugarcoat it, this was hardly the finest moment of the franchise. That said, it’s notable for the introduction of two key elements that would accompany the series as it became increasingly faster and more furious over the years. The first is director Justin Lin, who already demonstrates an aptitude here for capturing an exotic city’s spirit in his camerawork and getting a lot of mileage out of tuned-up rides flying around the corner at breakneck speeds. He’d become a vital player in converting these films into a lucrative cash cow for Universal over the next few installments that eventually ditched the street racing angle altogether. The other is enigmatic driving guru Han. Sung Kang effortlessly acts circles around everyone here, hinting at a world-weary soul trapped in a young man’s body, quite literally a drifter who ended up in Tokyo because he had nowhere else left to run to. Retaining him for the next several films and filling in his backstory was one of the few good results that came from this film.
Everything else about “Tokyo Drift” ranges from forgettable to flat out atrocious. Lucas Black’s acting is simply dreadful, and it doesn’t help that he might be the least credible high school student to ever be captured on film. Chris Morgan, whose scripts for these films would thankfully drastically improve down the road, assaults our ears with a barrage of overblown, pseudo philosophical musings that interpret speeding down the highway going 120 miles per hour as romanticized expressions of freedom. Everything is almost offensively dumbed down for the benefit of the target audience, which is to say teenagers who evidently don’t respond to anything but loud engines, defying their parents and impressing girls with the size of their cars.
And don’t even get me started on the involvement of the yakuza who have seemingly regressed to cutting deals with snotty high school kids who insolently walk up with a stolen bag of cash. Not to mention the notion that a widely feared crime boss would consent to a wager that involves exiling his nephew from the city if he loses a one-on-one car race. Then there’s Sean’s dangerously inept father, who switches from imposing a strict curfew, that his son not once adheres to, to allowing him to make deals with the most dangerous gangster in town because he is proud of his kid for sticking up for his values. It’s as if nobody took a moment to slam the breaks and take a moment to ponder if anything they were saying made any sense at all. Luckily, the ending, which was originally envisioned as a fun cameo, suggests that bigger and better things are afoot. And history would go on to prove that “Tokyo Drift” was just an ugly aberration in what I don’t hesitate to call one of the most consistently fun action franchises of our generation.
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