Takumi, a Japanese high school student, spends his days dreaming about his cute long-time friend and classmate Natsuki, working at a local gas station with his friend Itsuki, and delivering tofu for his father’s business every night in a dinky little white AE86 Toyota Trueno. Meanwhile, two amateur mountain racing experts, Ryosuke Takahashi and Takeshi Nakazato, friends and rivals, travel around Japan, racing others in different prefectures and keeping track of their victories.
They check out Akina Mountain in the Gunma area and visit Takumi’s gas station to challenge the “racing god” of the area that they keep hearing about. However, Itsuki, a bumbling and loudmouth fool is the one who has been spreading these rumors about himself, so he takes up their challenge to race. The expected occurs and Itsuki makes a fool out of himself, but later that night, when Nakazato is driving alone on the hill, a drifting AE86 returning from a tofu delivery easily beats him. When Nakazato returns to the gas station the next day for a rematch, no one seems to know who the driver is, while Takumi remains silently uninterested in the sport. However, circumstances eventually require him to show up for the race, shocking everyone and even himself as he begins to develop a competitive side.
Expectations may be a bit high for Initial D. We have a nearly perfect anime/manga being adapted into a big budget movie. But as if that isn’t enough, Andrew Law and Alan Mak, the duo responsible for the mega-hit, Infernal Affairs, move on to make this pic their next highly anticipated work. But we need more, so why not take superstar singer Jay Chou and cast him in his first lead role? Throw in Edison Chen and Shawn Yue to round out a fine cast with endless appeal for every teen, and then Anthony Wong because no one can resist him. If they had cast the Twins, something might have exploded.
Now it’s hard to say the film lives up to the hype, but at least they deliver on the cars. Employing skilled stunt drivers, a tad of CGI, flashy editing and strong wide-angle shots, Lau and Mak treat the viewer to splendid visuals and turn the races into the best parts of the film. The races exude style with split-screen eyes, soft fades and catchy music-- they are captured in a gloriously exciting way that the anime medium cannot handle.
But beyond these pretty sequences, nothing else is improved from Initial D’s translation to live-action. Fans of the anime will surely be disappointed in the shift to external representations of the races. Normally, the downhill battles can take well over thirty minutes in the anime, often with long, strategic voice-overs from the drivers analyzing the race in tense, technical detail, but the film’s need to condense means that the internalization is cut. Also gone is the distinctive euro-beat dance soundtrack that turned Initial D’s anime into a real treat. Instead, this version employs a combination of hip-hop, Jay Chou songs, a tad of rock and some simple electronica in the final race.
However, most of the changes are to be expected because this is only a two-hour film and the mainstream audience needs something more digestible. Oddly though, Lau, Mak and writer Felix Chong make the plot suffer far more than necessary by forcing in events from three seasons of the anime, rather than the simple underdog story of the first. While it is nice that they clearly did their research (sometimes even reusing direct lines), they overload the film with too many moments that lack emotional resonance because they never have the time to settle. The film trudges through this mechanical plot to hit certain points without focusing on the characters first.
Still, most of the cast at least does a fine job of filling out their characters. Jay Chou nails Takumi’s apathetic demeanor and Anne Suzuki captures the one dimension of Natsuki, but for some reason, their chemistry is horrendously lackluster rather than awkwardly adorable. Chapman To, despite being in his thirties, is somehow perfect for the high-schooler Itsuki, while Edison Chen and Shawn Yue do what’s necessary, (which is not terribly much) for their one note characters. Jordan Chan becomes a surprisingly strong antagonist with his miniscule screen time.
And Anthony Wong is great as usual, but he’s playing the wrong character. The filmmakers inexplicably decide to turn Takumi’s father from the undeniably cool, former “racing god” Bunta Fujiwara to a drunken child-beating father, which makes for some of the film’s worst scenes.
But in spite of some of the misguided changes, Initial D still manages to be the entertaining summer popcorn flick it was meant to be. Anime fans should be warned: only approach with a skeptical, detached manner. This is not anyone’s dream film, but simply one for viewers to tune out, enjoy fast-paced races, paper-thin relationships and some comic relief.
Reviewed by Tarun
