Of course I had to watch this movie since I was a big Initial D fan. I had high hopes when watching the opening scene where Jay Chou's character is effortlessly gliding down the mountain pass in his Trueno. That was the best part of the movie unfortunately.

Let's talk about the good first. The car scenes are pretty fun to watch sometimes. In many of the scenes they'll hug a turn on the inside and let the rear slide out and overtake the opponent. It's pretty fun to watch and you just have to wonder who the stunt men are or if they brought in Japanese drift legend, Tsuchiya on to the set for some of these shots.

Unfortunately that's the only thing that is good about this movie. Let's talk about the bad now. The characters are two dimensional. If you are a fan of the anime you will not find your beloved characters here. Jay Chou does a pretty bad job as the protagonist. I feel like he's always mumbling out his lines or is just wondering why he isn't doing the music video yet. Also, let's talk about his friends. They're morons. His best friend Itsuki is more of a raving idiot than his anime counterpart would ever hope to be. In the anime, this character talks about trying to get better and having Takumi as his inspiration. In the movie, this character talks about how he's a racing god and when he loses and wrecks he asks his poor father to buy him an even faster car (GTR) so that he can rematch and wreck that one too. Takumi's father is also a drunk and a bum. Also he is abusive. He beats his son and Jay Chou has scars on his back from all the beatings. I don't know what they were thinking by making him an abusive drunkard since obviously from the original material he was never one. Obviously, you can tell from what I'm writing here that the director probably never watched an episode of Initial D in his life.

I find the camera work to be also crappy and low budget. There are lots of scenes where they freeze the frame and you are left thinking "did something happen to my DVD player?" Nope. That's their creative take on racing. To freeze the scene even when it's a person's face talking. Then there's the music. Nothing in the movie was good except for Jay Chou's song. The racing scenes have music that sounds like a background track for a rap battle without the rapping. If you're a fan of the anime don't expect to hear your favorite eurobeat tracks or Move songs.

Overall I was bored, only paid attention during the races and got utterly perplexed by the ridiculous ending sequence where the people are celebrating. The other team and even his abusive father who has his arms around two young girls start cheering. Also I'd like to point out that not only is a 3 car race unfair, I've never seen a race with 3 cars in Initial D or any mountain race scene in any movie!

Next time try not to squeeze so much crap in.

There's a very odd background to this car racing movie, clearly aimed at the teenage crowd in Asia. It's based on a Japanese anime of the same name of the 1990s, and filmed in Japan with Japanese characters. And yet it's a Chinese film, in Cantonese language, with mainly Chinese actors playing the Japanese roles. Despite (or maybe because of) all this, INITIAL D: DRIFT RACER turns out to be a very middling type of film, although it is a damn sight better than the most execrable the genre has to offer (SPEED RACER).

Still, INITIAL D does deserve credit for making repeated scenes of cars racing on the same stretch of road throughout interesting, but the car chases are merely perfunctory and hardly the best thing about this. For a film based around racing, the film has much better characterisation than you'd expect, even if the central casting left me cold (I've never been able to warm to Jay Chou and that doesn't change here). The characters are far more realistic and their motivations more believable than in an average FAST AND FURIOUS film, for example.

There are welcome supporting roles for Edison Chen and Shawn Yue, who at least have the movie star charisma that Chou lacks, and Anthony Wong is a welcome presence as ever in a comedic supporting role playing Chou's dad. Chapman To bags the 'idiotic friend' role but his character does grow on you throughout, although the female characters in the cast are particularly ill served by the script. INITIAL D: DRIFT RACER is hardly a good film but it passes the time well enough for fans of Asian cinema, even if it is a film I'd never want to watch again.

This film, based on a Manga, is centred on Takumi Fujiwara and eighteen year old who delivers tofu for his father, a drunken ex-racer. This involves driving along the roads on Mount Akina that are popular with street racers. He has been driving the route since he was thirteen and can drive as fast as the racers. He also works at a local garage, which is owned by the father of his friend Itsuki. Itsuki aspires to be a racer but doesn't have Takumi's natural abilities. As the racers see Takumi's skills they naturally want to race him. Away from the cars Takumi is smitten with Natsuki, a girl in his class.

I must admit that I haven't read the manga or watched the anime version so viewed this film as a stand-alone work. The story is relatively simple but none the worse for that; it delivers where it counts and that is the thrilling races down a winding mountain road. These are filmed in a way that makes them feel real and thus exciting. As well as excitement there are plenty of laughs; mostly provided by Itsuki. Not too much of a problem but in many ways this feels like an origins story as we learn how Takumi is drawn into the world of racing; when it was over it felt like there was more to come. The subplot involving Natsuki was a bit of a distraction but not too much of one. I rather liked the fact that there was no obvious antagonist beyond a racer who is a bit rude to Takumi and Itsuki. The cast does a solid job making their characters believable and fun to watch; it was easy to forget that they were mostly Chinese actors playing Japanese... of course not speaking either language may have helped there! Overall well worth a watch if you enjoy exciting car based action set in an impressive location.

These comments are based on watching the film in Cantonese with English subtitles and the original music soundtrack.