It's here! It's here! I've been waiting for this movie for weeks!. Now that it's here, I don't know where to begin... the stupid premise, the cliché dialogue, the predictable storyline, the stereotypical characters, the repetitive cinematography... so many choices...

Last things first: Vin Diesel is in fact in this movie, but just a quick cameo appearance right at the end. The expression "too little, too late" comes to mind.

Let us start with what sets this movie apart from your average bad movie. Typically, a movie will have a small number of protagonists facing a larger number of antagonists. In this movie, everybody is an antagonist. There is not a single "good" person in the whole movie. A mother sends her juvenile delinquent son to Japan to avoid jail time for depraved indifference to human life and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage. And that's the "hero" of our story, that's the "good guy". Remember the kid from Sling Blade or American Gothic? It's him, but all grown up, physically anyway.

Now the supporting cast... all bad apples, every single one of them… We’ve already met his mother who flirts with the police officer as an attempt to get her son’s charges dropped. His father is a deadbeat who ran away to Japan to avoid fatherhood. His sidekick is peddling stolen goods. His nemesis, DK, is a Yakuza-connected wannabe gangster. His Sensei is DK’s partner in crime. And then… there are the girls... ohhhh... the girls...

The first girl we meet is flirting with our hero, but also happens to be the girlfriend of the Alpha-Jock of the school. Obviously, this matter can only be solved by... a race! What is a girl to do when her boyfriend issues such a testosterone-induced challenge to another beefy hunk? Well, she offers herself as the grand prize of the race, of course: "Winner gets me!", she proclaims. And of all the girls in this movie, she'd be the most suitable to bring home to Mama.

Once our hopelessly-southern hero gets to Japan, he meets tons of hood ornaments... err... girls. One in particular catches his eyes, but by some amazing coincidence, she's the girlfriend/property of DK, the Yakuza-connected nemesis I was talking about earlier. Our hero sure knows how to pick'em, doesn't he?

After being caught flirting with her, there can only be one solution to this flagrant display of impudence, and that is... a race!

But in Japan, they don't race like they do back home in Hazzard county, they "drift". What is drifting, you ask? It's the biggest thing to hit Japan since Godzilla. It's a style of driving where every turn is negotiated by sliding your wheels sideways, at every moment you are on the verge of losing control, regaining barely enough grip to make the turn with inches to spare, just in time to start sliding into the next turn. That is what they call "drifting" in Japan. In Québec, we call it "driving in January".

In that race, our fast-in-car-but-slow-in-brain hero, totally destroys the car loaned to him by a stranger. Since he now must pay for the damages, the stranger offers him a job. That stranger turns out to be DK’s partner, and that is how our clutch-happy hero is lured into the seedy underworld of Tokyo organized crime. Things are going well, at first, he makes some money, he's given a car, he gets instructed in the martial art of drift, he meets tons of girls, but he simply can't keep his eyes off DK's girlfriend. Even his Sensei warns him: "Why don't you find a nice Japanese girl like all the other white boys?".

Now comes the training montage intermingled with the burgeoning relationship scenes. Wax on, wax off... It takes a while, but our Ninja-of-the-wheel-wannabe is learning.

DK and the Sensei have a little disagreement in which the Sensei dies in a car chase (in the Yakuza world, small disagreements always end with at least one dead body). Our hero tells his father that he will not run away, he will stay and fix his mess. And how, do you suppose, he will fix this? What ingenious plan does he come up with to bring peace between two rival gangs and resolve the ménage-à-san ("san" means "trois") for good?... come on... say it with me... a race!!!

But first, we must have the reconciliation scene with his father, then the muscle car reconstruction scene, then the sharpening of the Samurai blade scene... errr... I mean, the tuning of the car scene... and only then can we have a race.

The cars are ready to go (shot of the brake pedal), the start signal girl gives the signal (shot of the brake pedal), the tires screech as the cars start to move (shot of the brake pedal), smoke rise from the tires (shot of the brake pedal), the cars reach the first corner (shot of the brake pedal), the cars slide through the first corner (shot of the brake pedal), the crowd cheers onward (shot of the brake pedal), repeat the last four shots a couple dozen times... at the last corner before the finish line (shot of the brake pedal), Donkey Kong's car slides out of control (shot of the brake pedal), his car falls right in front of our hero who (shot of the brake pedal) swerves just in time to avoid it and crosses the finish line. Ironically, no shot of the brake pedal as he brings his car to a complete stop. And there is much rejoicing...

If you see only one movie about drifting this year, see "Initial D" and avoid this one.