The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift Revved This Franchise Up

In hindsight, one particularly fascinating part about the Fast & Furious series is how, unlike most mega-blockbuster franchises, its initial films weren't all that great. The Fast and the Furious, the very first title in the saga, becoming a sleeper box office hit way above anyone's expectations showed that it clearly struck a chord with viewers. To boot, the importance of the original feature being one of the few American movies at the dawn of the 21st-century to star people of color cannot be underestimated, particularly when exploring how and why this series managed to resonate so storngly with audiences in the first place. But much like the DC Extended Universe or the Star Trek and Harry Potter movies, Fast & Furious didn't really hit its stride until its sequels came along.



That stride was hit with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which certainly isn't the best in the series but did see this automobile racing saga finally lean into cornball fun rather than run from it. The protagonists of the first two movies are ditched for Tokyo Drift, now we've got Arizona High Schooler Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) A.K.A. Jason Aldean Jr. leading the story. Boswell is a troublemaker who is constantly being shifted around America thanks to all the mayhem he causes. His newest stunt was so bad that he's been sent to live with his Dad in Tokyo, Japan where he is to simply attend school and never even think of going near a car.

This is a Fast & Furious movie, though, so you know it's only a matter of time before Boswell becomes enamored in the underground racing scene of Tokyo, which sees him making friends with Han (Sung Kang) and earning the rivalry of Takashi (Brian Tee), the local racing legend known as the Drift King. With this entry in the series, the Fast & Furious series was first graced with the presence of two men who would become principal behind-the-scenes architects for the series as a whole. Chris Morgan wrote Tokyo Drift before writing all subsequent Fast & Furious movies while Justin Lin took over the directors chair here before helming three other Fast & Furious sequels and he's currently directing his fourth Fast & Furious sequel as of this writing.

Tokyo Drift isn't an all-time masterpiece but the work by Morgan and Lin here makes it clear why they became such fixtures of the Fast & Furious saga in the future. Chris Morgan's writing clearly realizes how derivative every part of Tokyo Drift's story is, so the script just leans into making sure the characters are entertaining one-note archetypes that can compensate for the lack of originality. Bow Wow is around to play someone named Twinkie, Takashi threatens his sister in a sequence bursting with delightfully absurd dialogue and every other character (namely Sean's dad) seems to speak in ancient Japanese proverbs. It's all nonsense but this is a Fast & Furious movie, why not make the character interactions as silly as the car chases?

Chris Morgan's writing is a definite step up from the screenplay in prior Fast & Furious installments but he hasn't mastered the sincere pathos that would make the future movies in this series. so unexpectedly moving. The overall character arc of Sean Boswell is certainly undercooked. Boswell starts the movie a cocky driver who doesn't listen to rules and ends the movie a cocky driver who doesn't listen to rules. I suppose he did help Twinkie when he was getting bullied midway through Tokyo Drift in contrast to him not helping a bullied Arizona High School student in the opening credits, perhaps that's his character arc, but Sean Boswell's journey in Tokyo Drift still feels like as murky as a car riding around in the dark with its headlights off.

Of course, it's worth mentioning nobody came to Tokyo Drift for Sean Boswell's character arc, they came for the car racing, which is also a major step up from the previous Fast & Furious features. An opening race scene set in a neighborhood under construction makes it clear we're getting more creative locales for car chases in this movie and the rest of the film lives up to that promise. Some of it still manages to end up coming off as just a lot of noise but at least Lin's direction places a heavier emphasis on brightly colored automobiles (love Han's orange hot rod!) that make it easier to keep track of individual vehicles during the big set pieces. Justin Lin's gift for executing spectacle sequences involving cars would only get better from here but with Tokyo Drift, he got his Fast & furious directorial career off to a mighty solid start.