Following his latest high speed hi jinks, high schooler Sean Boswell is packed off to Japan (where his father lives) in order to keep him out of jail. There, he is introduced to the world of drift racing, which is basically all about racing cars sideways around corners. His first efforts do not go well, and he finds himself paying off a large debt for the car he wrecked in the process. Of course, the guy he owed the debt is also a drifting master, so Sean also gets to benefit from tutelage while this is going on. Doesn't seem like that bad a deal, really.
Of course, there's a also a woman involved in all this, and Sean spends most of the movie butting heads with her arrogant, Yakuza-connected boyfriend DK (which stands for "drift king"). What are the odds the movie will end with some kind of drifting race between Sean and DK, do you think?
Tokyo Drift is often seen as the low point of the Fast and Furious franchise (which financially, it certainly was). It's easy enough to see why. It's about a wholly new group of characters, so it loses the instant buy-in of any returning faces, and it feels both too familiar and too different at the same time. Too familiar because boy-oh-boy does the story hit a lot of action movie cliches; too different because as a friend pointed out, it's pulling those cliches from 80s martial arts films. It's basically "The CAR-ate Kid".
Check this one out only if you are a Fast and Furious diehard. Otherwise you're really not going to lose a lot by jumping straight to the fourth entry in the series, which turned the seemingly-declining franchise's fortunes around.
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