So man, there is a lot bad about this movie. The hero… no, scratch that, the protagonist is some doofy-ass dude with zero charisma. Like, you’re coming on the heels of Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, and you still manage to come off as an unlikable no-talent loser?

But as bad an actor as he might be, the script does him no favors by making him play a Southern fuckboy who is basically deported to Tokyo for being such a duke-boy idiot. And when he gets to Tokyo, he’s terrible at everything, but makes some powerful friends due to the power of protagonism. There’s no real reason this movie should be about him in any way — there are at least five characters with a better claim to be the centerpiece of the movie, but somehow he gets the nod.

Beyond the black hole at its center, this is by far the most misogynistic entry in the series, with women explicitly being held out as the prizes for winning races. None of these movies would exactly be held up as a role model for gender relations, but this one is many, many steps behind the first two (which had women in various roles, not just as relationship targets/sex objects).

There are three things that are interesting about this movie:

  1. The drifting. As street car racing goes, the drifting is cool. As I recall, this basically popularized the whole drift craze, which continues to power console racing games to this day.

  2. When a character is named “D.K.”, the protagonist guesses it stands for Donkey Kong. (It’s actually “Drift King,” which is stupid, but yes obviously Donkey Kong is your go-to there.)

  3. Most of the characters in it are yakuza, and there are various scenes — including the protagonist walking down an alley while four yakuza with baseball bats follow him in a group — that made me realize I really want to play the next game in the Yakuza series.

But that’s pretty much it! On the whole, I think this is a more interesting movie than the second one, if you can handwave past the misogyny, largely because of the better driving and more interesting setting, but this is still not a good movie.