I just watched The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift with my husband. I saw the first movie in the series, and thought it was actually pretty cool. I skipped the second movie because Vin Diesel didn’t reprise his role as Dominic Toretto and I didn’t think Paul Walker would be able to carry the film by himself. I decided to go ahead and watch this third one because it’s set in Tokyo, which is a city I’m somewhat familiar with.

Anyway, the plot is so ridiculous that I’m not even going to bother recapping it here for you. This isn’t going t be a proper review; I just pretty much want to rant about what a terrible movie this was! Here are all the problems I had with it:

1. Lucas Black (who played the main character Sean Boswell) looks like he’s in his late 20′s. I was supposed to believe this was an 18-year-old high school kid?? Um, yeah, okay.

2. Why would Sean’s father not live on the naval base? It made no sense that he was living in a Japanese-style shack rather than a Western-style house on the base.

3. Why wouldn’t Sean go to school on the base just like all the other military kids? Then the whole Japanese language barrier wouldn’t be an issue.

4. I’ve never heard of a Japanese high school in which all the kids have laptops in their classes. Most of the high schools that I’ve had personal experience with have a couple of computers in a “computer lab” — if that.

5. I highly doubt that there would have been a fistfight at a Japanese high school. Things like that are extremely rare because of the exclusivity of high schools. If Sean’s school was good enough to have laptops in the classrooms, then it was obviously an above-average school. Above-average schools wouldn’t have troublemakers around.

6. In the scene where DK was chasing Han and Sean through the streets of Tokyo: I’m so sure all the other cars would have been spaced perfectly apart thereby allowing DK, Han, and Sean to weave in and out of traffic like that. Tokyo streets are bumper-to-bumper, just like NYC or L.A.

7. How long was Sean in Tokyo? For a few days? A few weeks? Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have been long enough to learn how to drift so well that he could beat someone with the nickname of “Drift King”!!!!

8. So a handful of people can take a skeleton of a car, retrofit an engine, do the body work, and test drive it several times all in one day? Please come and train the mechanics over at the dealership I go to!

9. Like some Yakuza boss is going to allow a debt to be settled by a race??? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!

10. In that final race on the mountain, it appears that everyone’s watching the action on their cell phones. That’s why they’re able to react to all the lead changes and the close calls. In Roger Ebert’s review, he even mentioned that “the kids are able to follow [the race] because of instant streaming video on their cell phones.”

Hold on a second here…. in order to have streaming video, don’t you need someone filming the action in the first place??? And don’t tell me they were getting the video from cell phone to cell phone. For that to happen, there would have to be spectators lined up and down every inch of that mountain road, which clearly wasn’t the case.

I give Tokyo Drift 2 stars out of 5. It only ranks that high because of some cool racing scenes that were not enhanced by computers at all.