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The first five words of the title are fair warning that The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift has formula at its core. Not that there's anything wrong with that: The first installment in the franchise succeeded gloriously from that foundation, becoming a near-perfect B movie for Generation Y. But to director Justin Lin's credit, he at least introduces some nuance and mystery into what is otherwise just an expensively mounted racing-meets-gangland genre exercise. Tokyo Drift follows a lead-footed, trouble-prone high school student, Shawn Boswell (Lucas Black) from Phoenix to Tokyo, where he's sent to live with his estranged father in lieu of a stint in juvenile hall. There, he predictably lapses back into racing and falls in with a circle of friends who fix up cars for drift racing, which involves speeding down the road sideways through artistic use of the emergency brake. Where they get the money for these cars (and a constant supply of tires) involves a scowling gangster far down on the totem pole (Brian Tee) with a Eurasian girlfriend who's interested in Boswell. With its foreign setting and unorthodox racing style, this is the most ambitious movie in the series so far, and Lin's handling of the visuals is impressive. He thinks big, with overhead camera angles, rapid-fire cutting and dizzying crane shots. The balletic moves of drift racing have an inherent grace, and though Lin's race sequences can't touch the sheer beauty of those in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Initial D, they're thrilling in a Hollywood-action way. Where the formula falls short is, not surprisingly, in its hackneyed characterizations. Taipei-born Lin has a fairly sophisticated take on Tokyo that soft-pedals the "exotic" imagery, and he has said he demanded script changes after signing on to the project, but it appears there was only so much he could do. Do we need another cold, despotic Asian man who treats women like property, or one more tragic mulatto? One character we can thank Lin for is Han, an Asian-American who helps Boswell enter the underground world but whose own history is unclear. Sung Kang, a veteran of Lin's explosive Better Luck Tomorrow, gives Han an unflappable demeanor and a focus that are riveting. He nearly steals the show from Black, who carries a lot more weight than predecessor Paul Walker but still registers as little more than a good-looking placeholder. Also competing for our attention are Sonny Chiba, as an irritable yakuza kingpin, and a muscular presence from the beginning of the series who makes a brief appearance here. But let's face it: The cars are the stars here as much as anyone, as old-fashioned American muscle (with a twist) takes on foreign technology once again. Not that there's anything wrong with that.