ScreenWize

This feels like a product pulled off the shelf, re-packaged for business reasons with one eye on the Asian market, branded under the Fast & Furious label, and polished up to satisfy its carefully targeted customers: testosterone laden male teens. And if the product experience you are after is some great street racing sequences, then Taiwanese-born director Justin Lin won’t let you down: the cars throb their way through packed streets, thread their way down narrow mountain roads and screech around car parks –“drifting” spectacularly around any hint of a corner and, if the road is straight, around whatever obstacles have been carefully placed for that reason.

But if the car races are firing on all cylinders, the storyline is in need of a major service and the dialogue belongs in the scrap yard. Dispensing with the characters and storyline of the previous two Fast & Furious Films, we follow Southern bad-boy Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) who is sent to live in Japan with his father when his street racing antics become too much for his mother and the American police.

Once in Tokyo, Sean wastes no time finding a street-wise American friend and army brat Twinkie (Bow Wow) and falling for Neela (Nathalie Kelley) the girlfriend of gangster D.K. (Brian Tee) who is the nephew of the local Yakuza boss. Fortunately for Sean, all the trouble he gets himself into in this eight-cylinder, high-octane world can be resolved with a car chase, and after learning how to drift, Sean is able to challenge D.K. to a duel for the girl and for freedom. There are some obvious nods to the Western here, but these are neither clever enough nor sustained sufficiently to save the story from its woeful predictability.

With lines like “you make your choices and you don’t look back” filling the script, the cast don’t have much of a chance. The boys’ grimace and grin behind the wheel whilst the girls – cast only as babes in mini-skirts (including Sean’s mother!) – ooh and aah at the action and get awarded as prizes. One of Sean’s lines to Neela when she shakes her head at him about his love of cars, gives away a lot about the underlying message of the film: “I’m a guy! It’s in my DNA”. If you share the same evolutionary path as Sean, this product might give you a moment of revved up satisfaction too.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon