Never really wanted to write a review piece on this movie, only because the movie left less of an impact on me (well, I did anticipate that anyway) than I would have liked.

I vaguely knew about this movie a couple of months ago, and with Jay Chou as the leading actor of the film, you don’t really miss these kinds of news bits. Cousins in New Zealand told me that the film was out and a friend later mentioned that it was currently showing in Chinatown. Heh, I don’t normally dig Chinese films of any genre to be watched in a cinema. Well, this movie was an adaptation of one of my favourite animes, so nothing wrong with just giving it a try.

After the movie, like I mentioned, I came out without much of any impressions on me. The film had really good car action scenes, showing the drift technique that drivers use to pass the corners on mountain passes. Heh, must be exhilarating (and downright dangerous) to drive like that.

The bad bits of the movie. Horrible acting. Heh, as much as I’m a fan of Jay Chou’s songs, I’m not very much a fan of his acting. Even if Fujiwara Takumi’s character was very wooden, you can’t use that as an excuse to act too stick like. Then there’s the limited pool of actors/actresses in this region. There have been many collaborations between Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and Korea when it comes to making films. Sometimes I feel its just a popularity contest, to see which of the best stars you can pick for your film to boost its ratings. You have a handful of languages you need to deal with (obviously a Japanese actress cannot pronounce Cantonese as fluently as a native can) and there’s the horrible ‘lips not synching with the words’ issue.

The movie tried to compress nearly 2 seasons worth of the anime into a 2 hour film. For fans who’ve watched the series, you’d at least get an inkling of why certain things are the way they are. Here, things happen too quickly and some of the stories do not add up to the final plot (like the relationship between Takumi and Mogi). I have no complaints about the adaptation though, even if they had to change some and cut out a few character roles.

My last gripe would be the music for the entire movie. Initial D’s success was partly because of the Eurobeat music that was used throughout the race scenes. While the producers may want to be original in this department, the lack of said music really reduced the excitement associated with the races.

Heh. Why I didn’t want to write this review. It’s not something I really want to gripe about, and as such, I feel that I’m not adding any value into complaining about it. Although, these are just some of my opinions.