Karri_Koivusalo

The first movie was an uninspiring crime movie dressed as tuning/racing movie. This is much worse.

The movie is broken, period. It's badly written, badly scripted and totally uninteresting. Latter half of the movie is practically a yawn-fest, and you only wish to see the end credits as soon as possible. There's not enough racing stuff to fill a commercial break and absolutely no tuning stuff. The end chase is like a remake of the end of the Blues Brothers, and I'm not kidding.

On the positive side, they now say "nitrous" and the opening race involves a bit of cornering.

In an ironic sense, this movie is like much of the car tuning business these days. That is, cheap and fake, like the plastic hood pin replicas you attach on the hood with foam tape.

This movie has plenty of things to make a car enthusiast cringe; the way which this movie bunches car tuning, street racing and organized crime tightly together isn't exactly the most pleasing approach. The stuff about double-clutching, failing to use proper terms and very loose involvement on events in a race gives an impression the writer gained all his knowledge about race driving out of a five-point bulletin list on how to drive a Nascar racer. Finally, the movie practically drops out of street racing premise after 1/4th way through.

The street racing theme is only a facade to a substandard crime movie. It's soon obvious the movie is more about blasting away with guns than racing on the streets. Making a distinct good guy - bad guy -scenario and thus having the police to sanction the main character's actions, the movie did not have to deal with the legal and moral issues of street racing or the dangers involved. Pure street racing as such would probably have been too difficult a subject to the writer and too controversial for the producers, so they put guns, explosions, hi-jackers and an oriental gangster mob into the movie, none of which really belongs (well, except perhaps the gangster bunch, but they were made OTT, big time).

The race scenes aren't that well made either; they're about driving a straight line and when to hit the nitrous (or Nnnaaawwwzzz as it's called in the movie) for victory. It's not about who's the best driver, it's about who has the most $$$'s under the hood. There's not enough car stuff to keep enthusiasts interested, the plot pretty much sucks rocks through a garden hose and the bulk of the movie is generic crime movie material. The latter half of the movie is almost completely disconnected from the first, the two elements (racing and crime) support each other in a truly superficial way, and the dialog is awkward.

This movie is a live-action adaptation of a manga/anime series of the same name. The story is abridged synthesis of the first two seasons of the anime, with details from the fourth(third?) mixed in. Compared to the original work, much of the characters' personalities, relationships and motives have been altered, some in the ways that are hard to agree with, too. Many of the characters have been dropped or diminished. Judging the movie as independent entity, it's not a great deal, but some of the modifications make the story a bit confusing. Casting itself is rather good. Characters have strong resemblance to their drawn counterparts, apart from the main character and her girlfriend. To even things a bit, their characters are best preserved in the screenplay.

What I like in the movie best is it's honesty. The movie does not try to justify the illegal street racing theme with some far-fetched undercover cop/family honor/extortion -subplot, it's only about young men driving fast on downhill. Though the most spectacular stunts are CGI, the races are pleasant to watch, by no means small reason being the relatively calm pace of editing. Drivers' actions while cornering, the toe-heel braking, down shifting and steering, are usually shown in single shot, instead of several split-second extreme closeups. What I also liked was the fact the races are about who was the best driver, not about who has the most outrageous sticker or flashiest accessories on the car.

The movie has been criticized for lack of plot. I don't think it is so. The plot is subdued, not overly dramatized story of a regular kid who learns about downhill racing scene in his home town. The biggest problem with the script is the inclusion of 2nd and 3rd Stage. The plot makes all too abrupt change of direction halfway through the movie because of this. The movie finale is a synthesis of 1st season and rewritten 2nd season finales, it's awkward and not very successful. I can't help thinking the movie could have been better if the writers had made the scope a little less wide and only included the 1st season.

Even so, the movie is rather enjoyable. You don't need to vegetate through the movie to enjoy it, or have a die-hard passion for the subject.