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Start-and-stop action makes 'Tokyo Drift' exhausting

By BOB TOWNSEND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift," the third installment of the thrill-driving franchise, moves to Japan, where revved-up car culture is spot welded to disaffected youth culture in a videophone version of "Rebel Without a Cause."

Universal Pictures

'The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift'

The verdict: The third time starts with thrills and stops with yawns.

Director: Justin Lin
Starring: Lucas Black, Shad 'Bow Wow' Gregory Moss, Nathalie Kelley, Sung Kang, Brian Tee
Run time: 104 minutes
Release date: June 16, 2006
Rating: PG-13 for reckless and illegal behavior involving teens, violence, language and sexual content.
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The adrenaline-charged racing sequences have a kind of brutally modern elegance. But when their fingers slip from the nitro fuel-injection buttons and the teens are forced to say a few syllables, big chunks of the movie come to a tire-screeching halt. And that start-and-stop action ultimately makes "Tokyo Drift" exhausting to watch.

The seen-it-before story spins out around bad boy street racer Sean Boswell, played by Lucas Black. Black was the solemnly charming child who played opposite Billy Bob Thornton in "Sling Blade," then grew up with him in "Friday Night Lights." Here, Black's sporting a few stray whiskers but keeping to his mumbling Alabama drawl, and his jumpy, fish-out-of-water character hardly seems like acting.

After one too many brushes with the law, Black's Boswell is sent from a nameless Southern suburb to Tokyo to live with his Navy dad. And though dad does his best to administer a dose of military-style discipline, it isn't long before his wayward son is carrying on again, burning rubber with a gang of Japanese car-club "drifters" — including sidekick Bow Wow, love interest Nathalie Kelley and antagonist Brian Tee.

"Drifting" is the pop hook for this version of "The Fast and the Furious," and as far as it goes, it's a pretty good one. The motor sport technique, which originated in Japan about 30 years ago, involves precisely controlled spurts of oversteering. That makes for a wilding, sideways motion that extreme drivers use to careen up and down steep mountain roads and even through the tight confines of urban parking garages.

Along with lurid, neon-lit peeps of contemporary Tokyo, with nubile females in scanty fashions, the car races that occur every 15 minutes or so are bound to bring lots of young guys out to theaters to see "Tokyo Drift." And despite the end credits warning about how dangerous the stylized movie stunts would be to try at home, you have to wonder how many of them will be shredding tires around the streets of their subdivisions this summer.