The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
April 6, 2020 7:00 p.m.
What Did I Expect? The cars would be fast. The people would be furious. Oh, and it would take place in Tokyo!
My Favorite Part: There’s a part when a bunch of cars are drifting up a winding hill at night, and I took the note, “I do like watching them drift in some of the calmer scenes. It’s relaxing like watching sand-cutting videos on Instagram.” I also loved the very end when (spoiler alert?) OUR MAN DOM SHOWS UP!
My Least Favorite Part: Once again, misogyny is par for the course in a frustrating way. Specifically, though, I would like to focus on how hard it was to get on board with our hero, Sean. He made numerous terrible decisions, only thought about himself, and had all the “bad boy” vibes with absolutely none of the charming or redeeming qualities that make people fall for bad boys.
A Brief Summary of My Experience:
“This is more like Fast and the Furious: Toxic Masculinity Drift,” my husband said during a particularly bro-y moment between Sean and the film’s antagonist, D.K.
Reader, I am so mad I didn’t come up with that phrase first, because it’s pretty spot-on for how it felt to watch this movie. Since the hero was so hard to root for, it made the whole movie feel flatter and less zippy than the first two installments.
At the risk of sounding bonkers because I am not nor have I ever been a “car person,” … for some reason, I didn’t feel the connection between the drivers and their cars that existed in the first two installments. And I missed that!
Finally: there was, at one point, a shot of wild-looking motorcycles with NOS tanks attached. I could not wait to see those in action. AND THEN THEY NEVER SHOWED UP IN A RACING SCENE!
My Final Rating: 4/10 Failed Chekov’s Nitrous Oxide Motorcycles