Tokyo Race ‘, the rush is not good.
If it’s not a remake, it’s a second or third or fourth or twenty-ninth part. That’s the way things are in Hollywood. And it is that money commands gentlemen, and it seems good to me, if something decent were done, of course. Given the enormous profits that the two previous installments made, it was to be expected that they wanted to continue exploiting the goose that lays the golden eggs. I only saw the first one, directed by Rob Cohen, and it had seemed like a lazy movie, an undercover remake of ‘They Call Him Bodhi’, but Cohen will never have the visual and narrative claw of Kathryn Bigelow, by the way, an excellent director who seems to have lost, what will become of her ?.
The second part I didn’t even bother to watch it anymore. By the way, even without Vin Diesel in its cast, it was much higher grossing than its predecessor. The truth is that I do not know what has moved me to see the third part. Maybe I wanted to evade for a while without having to pay too much attention, or maybe it was wanting to see how Hollywoood now begins to be very interested in everything that comes out of Asia, to the point of introducing it into his own cinema. So much so that this new installment has been shot in Tokyo, with the majority of oriental actors. With that they have achieved absolutely nothing. We continue to attend, and in this case it is even worse, the typical movie for brains. The argument is simple, but delirious if we stop to dissect it properly: the 18-year-old boy on duty, a lover of speed and with an old car ready to race like the most, participates in a race to challenge the girlfriend of Another guy, who’s one of the dumbest chicks. So to begin with, we have a protagonist who is mentally ___ed. As we are obviously at the beginning of the film, the race goes wrong and the police catch them. Nothing happens to the wedding couple, since they have influential dads, but to our hero we have to give him a good fight. And what does the mother decide? then send him to his father to learn a little discipline and forget about the world of cars. And look where the father is a military man who currently lives in nothing more and nothing less than in Tokyo. The poor man receives his son in his 10 square meter apartment and tells him that he will live in a tremendous mansion under his rules, if not he can go away. And what does the baby do? What do you think? Will he obey the orders of his concerned father? Will you forever forget about cool chachi illegal car racing? Will he get the girl of his dreams? Will you speak Japanese perfectly when the occasion calls for it? Find out for yourself.
Justin Lin, who achieved a certain popularity at the time with ‘Better Luck Tomorrow’, does not direct the film, he simply puts his name after the famous “Directed By”. And it is over. He doesn’t even bother to shoot some action scenes that could have been much better and much more spectacular, taking advantage of the new setting in which they take place. But no, there is not the slightest style or the slightest personality in these sequences, in which by the way, digital effects are abused.
The script, if we can call it that, is full no longer of incongruities, but of supine stupidities to the fullest. Everything happens at an astonishing speed, and even though we are aware that the Cinema allows certain licenses, nothing that happens interests us, because we simply find it incredible for being an idiot. And I’m not talking about the possible impossible races where cars become important, no. I mean the different situations that the main character goes through. Some truly delusional and embarrassing.
This time they have not shot any famous star, but Lucas Black, a more or less well-known actor (recently we have seen him in ‘Jarhead’), and the truth is that Black does not contribute absolutely anything to the film. In fact, it spoils it even more, since the actor is frankly unbearable. Beside him Bow Wow, a rapper into an actor, who I don’t think had any problem playing himself. And who do you think is in a special cameo? Well, someone known to all Who will it be? Who will it be? Nothing, until just the end of the film you will not know.
An awful mess, the kind that really insult the cinema, and they do it with enthusiasm. By the way, the original subtitle is ‘Tokyo Drift’ What’s the “Race” thing about? Sounds better? Is it more spectacular? Will more people go to see her for that?
