The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: Critic Reviews

The third movie in the Bad News Bears series, a notable turkey, went to Japan. That trip spells certain doom for the Fast and the Furious franchise as well.

A number of questions spring to mind when considering The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Can the movies possibly get any faster or more furious? What exactly is the Tokyo Drift? And does Al Gore know what we can do to stop it?

The only Drift you'll experience is the one towards sleep.

The cars only flirt with destruction. And the movie only flirts with entertainment.

Tokyo Drift is a subculture in search of a compelling story line, and Black's leaden performance makes you pine for the days of Paul Walker.

The kind of movie in which plot and performances (and members of the fairer sex) are treated as accessories, Tokyo Drift is all about the action. And on that count, it won't let you down.

To call it a great film would be to oversell it, but as a fun, fascinating work of kinetic art, a 100-minute visual spectacle, it's a knockout.

It delivers all the races and crashes you could possibly desire, and a little more.

For all its crashes and flash, this is a movie that drifts away as we watch it. Muscle cars and all, it's often a waste of gas.

Despite all the silliness the drift races are gripping, and director Justin Lin captures Tokyo's energy and glitter far better than Sofia Coppola.

OK, they squeezed one more lap out of this franchise. It's been a fun ride, but it's time to shut things down. If you get my drift.

Going to Japan for this movie was a smart move by the filmmakers. Not only does it provide new backdrops for the races, but the F&F movies (as their fans call them) have drawn a huge international fan base.

A crazy-cool screech of a movie, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is a complete gas, a mad cross-cultural twist on a near-forgotten film genre that keeps your eyes glued to the screen.

Director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow) goes back to basics, back to what everyone liked about the original, namely mindless car-racing fun.

You've seen it all before, except that you haven't, not quite this way.

The movie teaches us that you can flip your car down a mountain 15 times and walk away from it with two Tylenol.

This is an exceptionally stupid and irresponsible movie on some levels. But it does score points for style and exotic location.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is vile, moronic, sexist and possibly harmful to society. As vile, moronic, sexist and possibly harmful entertainments go, however, it is frequently a hoot.

Anyone who still longs to see gaijin yahoos tear up Tokyo's streets will be appeased by the high-speed action in this perfunctory but reasonably efficient entry in the franchise spawned by the 2001 surprise hit The Fast and the Furious.

The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.

Aside from trying my patience, the film offered one important lesson: never again attend a movie with the words 'fast' and 'furious' both in the title.

So what if the movie dumbs down Japanese culture to a bad yakuza movie and features Japanese characters who can barely speak Japanese? The cars are the stars here. Everything else is lost in translation.

The thin story and thinner characters are just setups for the race sequences, which are punctuated by lavish parties where lithe women seem to outnumber the guys by a 5-to-1 ratio.

Look out for a star cameo -- it's the only surprise you'll get from this heap.

Best viewed as an energetic cartoon, an unintentionally amusing, head-shaking guilty pleasure that will divert those not in the mood for anything more profound than gleaming metal and preening women.