Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift

O.k....I admit it! I designed this blog to showcase pictures and summaries of carshows, cruise-ins, and cars of friends and family. The idea of having "rice-burning" "turner" cars even pictured in this blog is a bit unsettling.

My 15 year old son enjoys the Fast and Furious movies, and today, I bought the 3rd movie: Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift. While I myself do not have much interest in the import scene, I do appreciate that the writers of these movies have always seemed to include a few American built muscle cars in each of the F&F trilogy.

If you haven't seen Tokyo Drift, I've copied and pasted a nice summary of the plot that I found on the internet:

Sean Boswell, who has always been an outsider. A loner at school, his only connection to the indifferent world around him is through illegal street racing -- which has made him particularly unpopular with the local authorities. To avoid jail time, Sean is sent out of the country to live with his Farther in the military, in a cramped apartment in a low-rent section of Tokyo. In the land that gave birth to the majority of modified racers on the road, the simple street race has been replaced by the ultimate pedal-to-the-metal, gravity-defying automotive challenge ... drift racing, a deadly combination of brutal speed on heart stopping courses of hairpin turns and switchbacks. For his first unsuccessful foray in drift racing, Shean unknowingly takes on D.K., the "Drift King," with ties to the Yakuza, the Japanese crime machine. The only way he can pay off the debt of his loss is to venture into the deadly realm of the Tokyo underworld, where the stakes are life and death. Written by Press Release

In this movie, the main character, Sean, starts out with an "in-process" early Monte Carlo. He is seen working on it in a high school auto mechanics class. Later, he races a rich "punk" in his daddy's Viper. Unfortunately, both cars in up being totaled, (I think I might of shed a tear or two as the Monte rolled over and over across the screen).



Because he has been in trouble in 3 different towns for racing, his mother sends him to Tokyo to live with his military father. Toward the end of the film, he finds out his father has a "rough" Mustang with no drive train in the garage. Sean and his friends swap out a souped up Nissan engine and trick the Ford out. The final race involves Sean in the 'Stang against the antagonistic character in his Nissan Z. Of course Sean wins the downhill drifting race, with the Z going over the edge of the narrow road.





I guess the thing that bothers me a bit about movies like this is the number of vintage vehicles they have to go through to make the movie. (see picture). In the first two F&F movies, they wrecked a Yenko Camaro, a Dodge Charger, a Vette, and a late-model Mustang among others. All in all, the vintage cars always make the sub-par acting, weak story lines, and Japanese "pop cans" tolerable for me. The bottom line for me is that regardless of the cars, it is great to have something (i.e. an interest in automobiles) that can be enjoyed and shared with my son in the same way that my father and I have been able to do.