Fast and Furious – How Han is alive after his death in Tokyo Drift | Films | Entertainment

The Fast and Furious movie timeline is pretty complicated thanks to the third film Tokyo Drift, in which Sung Kang’s Han died in a car wreck.

The spin-off, which features a cameo by Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto at the end, is officially set between Fast and Furious 6 and 7.

The reason is that Dom and Han share the screen in movies 4-6, with the latter deciding in Fast and Furious 6 to go and live in Japan for the events of Tokyo Drift.

Then, in Fast and Furious 6’s end credits scene, Han’s death was retconned with the cause of his crash revealed to be Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw.

So just how was Han back in Fast and Furious 9?

READ MORE: Fast and Furious timeline – Fast and Furious movies watching order before Fast X

It turns out that Han’s death was faked by Kurt Russell’s Mr Nobody, with some high-tech visual illusion. Retconning his demise again, Fast 9 reveals that the street racer was working for him in Tokyo. Han had a connection to Project Aries, as discovered by Letty and Mia in Fast 9 when his name turned out to be connected to the activation key for this tech.

After reuniting in Tokyo, Han shared with the family that Mr Nobody had hired him to steal a certain technology. Mr Nobody knew he could trust Han since the street racer’s late girlfriend Gisele had worked for Kurt’s character in running drugs in Central America. Of course, this tech turned out to be Project Aries and Anna Sawai’s Elle was the activation key since her parents created it.

When she was just a girl at the time, Han acquired Project Aries before Fast 9’s villain Jakob Toretto could, however, his team did kill Elle’s parents. Since Mr Nobody knew his agent Jakob had gone rogue and that Shaw intended to kill Han, he helped faked the street racer’s death in that Tokyo Drift crash.

How exactly this is achieved aside from it being a technological illusion isn’t clear. But what is, is that Han was with Mr Nobody watching the car explode with “Han” inside in a “pretty nifty magic trick”.

It’s pretty convoluted for sure, but all that really matters is that Han was finally back after being absent for two Fast and Furious movies. And what was particularly satisfying was seeing him reunited with Lucas Black’s Sean Boswell, the lead of Tokyo Drift, at the end of Fast 9.

Black too had been brought back into the franchise, after a short cameo with Vin in Furious 7. However, although Han is back for Fast X, Sean doesn’t appear to be. But we bet he’ll be in 2025’s Fast X Part 2.

Fast X hits UK cinemas on May 19, 2023.