According to the filmmaker, this movie is far less offensive than the original script, so that’s definitely something.

As you know, I think this is a really dumb franchise. Each time I watch one of these films, it does not improve my opinion.

This film exists in a world where teenagers solve their problems with car races. I don’t know if that world ever truly existed but, if it did, it existed in another decade. The girl the two of them are fighting over is one of the worst characters I can remember seeing in a movie. She exists solely to egg on these two idiots and then doesn’t like it when things go too far. She is a cliché. She is a stock character, barely.

The race is really, really long. Good thing a place exists where they can do that.

I don’t think they tell us what state they’re in, if only so they can be extremely vague about the criminal code and the consequences our hero faces. It would be “three strikes, you’re out” only his mom apparently gives the cop a blowjob, or something. The shit that happens in order to get this “kid” (24) to get to Japan is comical. It exists in the same world as the teenagers racing instead of fighting.

He goes to Japan and is instantly enrolled in a Japanese-language school. As any Canadian can tell you, Japan has no shortage of English-language schools yet somehow this guy can’t get to one. (Young Canadians are constantly recruited to teach English in Japan and South Korea. I know those are English schools, but the idea there isn’t an English-language school for this kid and the other foreigners is a joke.)

This guy experiences no jet lag and within less than a day he has already met a kid who is into racing. They are in Tokyo, a city with a massive transit system where it is pretty safe to assume most teenagers don’t own cars.

The car racing scene in Tokyo looks remarkably similar to what this series envisions as the car scene in the US, only now (almost) everyone is Japanese.

And he’s immediately racing. The movie implies he’s been there for like 24 hours. This is definitely what real life is like.

I think at this point I stopped taking notes and just wallowed in my own crapulence. (I was sick while watching this.)

This franchise has not respect for its audience and nobody cares. I know this is supposed to be “the worst one” but I don’t see how it’s so much worse than the others except in its lower budget.

3/10