Han, Solo: On Tokyo Drift
Art, consent, and snacks
I did not expect my initial viewing of Tokyo Drift to provoke an internal moral debate, but life and cars sometimes zig when I expect a zag. To paraphrase an old Yiddish proverb: when we plan, God and Vin Diesel laugh.
The third entry in the Fast and Furious franchise is an odd film that seemingly exists outside the high octane world we’ve come to know and love, at least until our greatest living American, Sir Vincent of Dieselshire, appears in a cameo at the end. The best character is a new guy who doesn’t get enough screentime (Han Lue, played by Sung Kang). And strangely, star Paul Walker is not in the third movie, apparently because the studio felt he was too old and this was to be a movie about teens. But he was very much on my mind while I watched it, for a most peculiar reason.
This film begins in a high school-adjacent setting. I have done my best to avoid most spoilers about these movies, as well as any salacious or distracting information about the people who helped make them. But one element bears mention. In 2006, when the film was released, a 33-year-old Walker was allegedly also spending time in a high school-adjacent setting.
I don’t know quite how to parse this information, which readers have repeatedly sent me since I began my Fast-watching odyssey, so I will simply…
