Review of Initial D (2005) by Sean M — 21 May 2010

[b]Initial D[/b] is a summer blockbuster in the best and worst ways. Let me show you what I mean with a list of adjectives that pretty much applies to the movie in its entirety: brainless, fluffy, effortlessly funny and occasionally cheesy, more than a tad formulaic, and eye-candy-packed. By which I mean we get feather-light performances from most of the superstar-jammed cast; no heavy emoting here that might result in a Golden Horse award, no sir. Meat and poison, folks, meat and poison. If you're in the mood for just such a relentlessly cheery, untaxing action blockbuster, chock-a-block with exciting car racing sequences, this is probably just the movie for you. If you prefer your blockbusters dripping with angst, go watch [i]Batman Begins [/i]instead.

Of course, if you're a Jay Chou fan (and in Asia you can throw a dart in a crowd of people and chances are you'll hit someone who likes at least one of his radio-friendly R&B pop tunes), you really couldn't go wrong with this movie. In his movie debut, Chou plays Takumi Fujiwara, the taciturn son of a drunk of a tofu-seller Bunta (Anthony Wong) who's been helping his dad deliver tofu up and down Mount Akina for years. Mount Akina is a dream race track for street racers, including speed demons Ryousuke (Edison Chen) and Takeshi (Shawn Yue). Takumi, whose dad was apparently as close to being a world champion as Japan ever got, has inherited his dad's skills, illegally honing them on the Mount Akina course for years, and soon gets caught up in competing with the other racers, even professionals like Kyouichi (Jordan Chan). The movie is really about Takumi's move towards taking up street racing seriously, as he gets an ever bigger thrill from competing against ever better racers, although it also juggles a love story with the perky Natsuki (Anne Suzuki).

Is the plot full of holes? Like a good little by-the-numbers summer blockbuster, yes, it most dutifully is. It's a thin little structure, since the movie, although ostensibly about Takumi's inner struggles in becoming a street racer, never really addresses the concerns he has. It's a self-realisation epic lite--all we get is flimsy set-up, with a character who tells his dad he doesn't know what he wants to do with his life, but clearly gets a growing kick out of racing. The love story is kind of a lazy tack-on too, although how much you buy into it depends on whether you think Suzuki is doing a brilliant job or is just too darn cute for her own good. Although offering a number of hilarious and even sweet moments, including Takumi's goofy lovesick look for days after their first kiss, Takumi's blossoming romance with Suzuki hardly needed to be there. The dramatic twist that it provides could have just as easily been slotted into, say, Takumi's relationship with his dad, and might have made more sense in his decision to become a racer. And the ending--it's mysteriously abrupt, though in its defense it wasn't a cop-out, but leaves the movie without a coda and a couple more minutes that might have eased us out of the movie better.

Nevertheless, style is never going to win out over substance in a movie like this, and style you get in spades from co-directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. Again, this is a love-it-or-hate-it thing: Lau and Mak make liberal use of the editing facilities available to them, especially the pause button, and splice the races together very effectively, zooming from aerial shots of Mount Akina's remarkably perfect route to split-screens featuring close-ups of each of the main racers at key points during the climactic final race. But I can see why one could be turned off by it--it's like one long MTV, a complaint that can actually be levied at the whole movie--and surely some people would want a motion-sickness warning on this to warn them off even buying tickets if they're pregnant or whatever. (Okay, it's not that bad, but it is a little excessive.) Once you get used to it, though, you hardly notice it, and in fact the directors use it for a couple of quite funny sight gags, and I'll like anything if it's whacked-out funny. Thankfully Lau and Mak don't take themselves too seriously (this is a blockbuster, after all), and we're treated with a few delightful minor characters like Bunta, whose drunken bouts of narcolepsy are bust-a-gut hilarious, including the time he falls dead asleep on the phone and his old friend Yuuichi (Kenny Bee) for some inexplicable reason stays on the line. In fact, the smart banter between Bunta and Yuuichi make them the stand-out secondary characters, compared to the mandatory but very annoying sidekick in the form of the clueless Itsuki (Chapman To).

Performances-wise, Chou doesn't really have to work all that hard at making Takumi real, since Takumi is hardly the most taxing of roles and emotional depths aren't what this movie-slash-extended-MTV is aiming for anyway. Instead, he puts his laidback charm and MTV-emoting skills to good use, and has a sweet, attractive screen presence that bodes well for his future in movies. It helps that his malleable features can look blank one moment, goofy or pained the next. (And, as a fangirl, he really is too cute... he gets cuter the more you look at him. Sorry, I just [i]had [/i]to allow myself the one completely subjective comment.) He receives able support from Wong, who spends at least half his screen time with his eyes shut, but still emerges as the best, most fully-sketched character, even though he's really little more than scruffy, deadbeat-dad comic relief. (And that's quite a feat.) Neither of the new generation of teenybopper movie princes Chen and Yue has to break much of a sweat in their roles, but they do make the movie pretty, so hey, I'm more than okay with them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: brainless, fluffy, effortlessly funny and occasionally cheesy, more than a tad formulaic, and eye-candy-packed. But good fun, in spite of--or more likely because of--all that.