Fast & Furious 3 (Tokyo Drift)
I have to talk about this movie, "Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift," which got 36% from Rotten Tomatoes critics and 69% from moviegoers, which feels about right, though as a viewer I feel it should be at around 85%. People who watch movies for a living won't enjoy this. Those of us with a more reasonable movie diet can appreciate it for what it is: a really good pepperoni pizza.
It was surprisingly good. I get why Christopher Nolan praised it in a recent interview. Very different from the first two. (Each film had a different director.) The guy who directed this one, Justin Lin, got the next three films in the franchise, and I can see why. He's that good.
This is a cliche story done very, very well. The main character, Sean, is a troubled high school kid whose main outlet is reckless driving. He gets in trouble, again. He gets one last chance to turn his life around... but no. He doesn't. His mama says, "I'm not moving again," and she sends him to his father, a middle-aged Navy lieutenant living in Japan. Sean has to go to a Japanese high school with uniforms. His father's apartment is crap, and he's pretty low-rank for a middle aged guy; he frequents hookers, and... he also has good advice, and he doesn't yell at Sean or hit him. He has rules, which the kid breaks, and instead of an exaggerated teen-movie confrontation, Sean removes himself and crashes with a friend he made through street racing.
Sean has a southern accent, and it sounded right, so I had to look him up, and yep, the actor (Lucas Black) is from Alabama. I love that nobody tried to "fix" that. He reminds me of friends in East Texas, right down to his chili-bowl haircut.
The pacing and editing is likewise intelligent. One example: You learn he beat a certain mean kid in a race by the film just showing us the end of the race, with the kid having a hissy fit. Another: When the mixed-race hot chick who's befriended him confronts her abusive boyfriend (who hates Sean), there's no speech. She just says, "It's over," and... it's not resolved. He insults and threatens her, and she cries, because she recognizes he still has power over her. End scene. Things stay the same.
The rest I won't detail, because you may enjoy it. Besides amazing driving, there's no magical physics and no deus ex machina. People get hurt. Prices have to be paid.
There's a dumb moment at the end that really felt tacked on by producers, but otherwise, it was a surprisingly good bit of cheesy filmmaking that focuses on how to grow up when life isn't fair.