¡QUÉ HORROR! 2017

Candidate #9

I AM A HERO

(October 2015)

And here's another zombie film that takes an interesting and atypical approach to its narrative.

Based on the manga by Hanazawa Kengo, Sato Shinsuke’s I Am a Hero follows struggling mangaka’s assistant Hideo (Ôizumi Yô), still waiting for his big break, much to the increasing annoyance of his girlfriend, Tekko (Katase Nana).

Will our, ahem, hero finally get his own work published and serialized, and get the girl?

Then again, it probably doesn’t matter, ‘cause, you know… zombie apocalypse.

As we well know, zombie apocalypses tend to muck up the small, trivial things the human race has usually got going on, things like plans and life…

There are dollops of thrills and black comedy and pathos here amidst the gore and the grue--and there’s a whole lotta that, so be warned--as well as a tip of the zombie hat to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

I Am a Hero is the perfect antidote for those all-too-relentlessly grim soap opera zombie titles out there…

(I Am a Hero OS courtesy of wwwatch.in.)

reVIEW (33)
ELEKTRA

Since my review for Suspect Zero went up here at the Iguana because it was co-written by Zak Penn, I figured this one should go up too, since it was also written by Penn. (Boy, it’s a good thing I enjoyed Incident at Loch Ness, or Penn might think I’ve got it in for him…)

Marvel really does know how to shoot itself in the foot.
For all their initiative in translating their superhero properties onto the big screen in the past few years—leaving DC far behind in the dust—it’s really only been Bryan Singer’s X2, Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, that have passed muster. All their other movies have run the gamut from, a) better-than-good-but-not-great (X-Men), to b) disappointing (Ang Lee’s The Hulk), to c) just plain awful (Mark Steven Johnson‘s Daredevil).
Rob Bowman’s Elektra though, has the distinction of being the first of Marvel’s recent screen adaptations that is downright boring. And if it’s one thing a comic book film shouldn’t be, it’s boring. The four-color world of comics is frenetic and stylized, charged with adrenaline, and, in the case of red-clad assassin Elektra, a fair amount of pubescent hormones. Unfortunately, none of that is carried over to Bowman’s film.

Picking up some years after the events in Daredevil, Elektra begins with some voice-over back story by Terence Stamp’s Stick, before segueing into a standard sequence which is supposed to establish how formidable our heroine is. Her existence is now considered an urban legend, since she died, after all, in Daredevil. Now an assassin-for-hire, it isn’t long before she gets embroiled in the affairs of The Hand, an evil order of ninja—we know they are evil because when their minions die, they dissolve into billowing yellow smoke—with sinister designs on “The Treasure,” a warrior pivotal to the battle between light and dark.
What follows is a film that is not so much predictable as it is blandly unsurprising. Revelations are made in the course of the story that do absolutely nothing to raise the tepid sense of detached observation which quickly sets in while watching Jennifer Garner alternate between agonizing over the loss of her mother at an early age, and kicking Hand butt.
Sadly, not even the action sequences do much to alter the tenor of Elektra. Uniformly unimpressive—despite one that has a neat set-up with a multitude of floating white sheets—the fight scenes are even more inept than another recent Marvel entry, Blade: Trinity’s, and those were already nearly dispensable. Even the showdown with the quartet of enemy warriors—who we know are formidable and merciless because their grand entrance is done in slow-motion—are horribly inconsequential, as is Elektra’s face-off with main baddie, Kirigi (Will Yun Lee; Colonel Moon from Die Another Day). More’s the pity, considering Kirigi’s (again) none-too-surprising significance to Elektra’s life.

Zak Penn‘s script, in attempting to give us a human protagonist with a past filled with pain and emotion, ends up delivering a story totally devoid of action and tension, dealing, as it does, with story elements we’ve all seen before: the supposedly stone-cold killer with a good heart; the contract that isn’t what it seems; the targets that cause the killer to be conflicted, etcetera, ad nauseum.
Nowhere in the film’s running time do we actually feel a threat, a sense of danger. At no single point do we feel that life is a precious thing. After all, those of Elektra’s order can raise the dead, as they did with her. With that sort of power in your corner, why bother to worry?

Rob Bowman, meanwhile, elevates Elektra not a whit beyond its tension-free beginnings. An X-Files directorial alumnus, Bowman then went on to helm the X-Files feature film, as well as Reign of Fire. Other than a phantasmagoric kiss in a forest, and one of Elektra’s flashbacks involving an apparent demon, nothing in the film is indicative of any sort of directorial flair. Like the X-Files movie, Elektra is straight-forward and by-the-numbers, leaving no residue at all, no lingering feeling of “What did I just see?”, of the revelatory wonder that cinema is capable of.
Perhaps if the director were more versed in the very specific sort of world Elektra’s story is set in, then things would have turned out differently. This is a world steeped in martial arts and mysticism, the world of the Hong Kong martial arts genre, or, to be truer to Elektra’s comic book roots, the world of Japanese manga and anime.

Now, lest I be accused of racism, let me reiterate: Elektra needed a director versed in the genre. Quentin Tarantino understood it well in the Kill Bill saga, as did Guillermo del Toro in Blade II, and the Wachowskis in The Matrix, and none of them are Asian. Inappropriately, Bowman seems to have approached the material as if it were a normal action film with a touch of the supernatural thrown into the mix. Elektra needed to be soaked in a certain atmosphere, to have a specific sensibility. Instead, it languishes in a flavorless stock of mundane proportion.
Not even the presence of charismatic Terence Stamp—who has done everything in his career from facing down the Man of Steel in Superman II, to prancing around the Australian outback in drag in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert—manages to make a dent in the terribly pedestrian armor Elektra is wrapped in.

In the end, where Elektra is concerned, I think this was the biggest surprise: spinning off from the awful Daredevil, I thought it would either be better, or worse, with the greater possibility of being better, as Daredevil was already pretty bad
I just never expected Elektra to be a big, stupefying bore.

(Elektra OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above is a slightly altered version of a previously published review entitled “Marvelous Bore.”)

DESU NOTO (DEATH NOTE) (Review)

Based on the popular manga by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, Shusuke (Azumi 2: Death or Love) Kaneko’s Death Note tells the story of college student Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara, from Batoru Rowaiaru II: Chinkonka: Battle Royale II: Requiem, and Takashi Miike’s Sabu), who finds a mystical notebook belonging to the Death God Ryuk, a dodgy CGI construct appearing to be a very tall Marilyn Manson with wings and a fanged Joker’s grin.
Complete with handy, detailed instructions (I guess Ryuk wants to cover his bony a$$ against law suits from the afterlife), the notebook has the power to kill any person whose name in written on its pages, with the proviso that when you do write down a person’s name, you need to visualize that person’s face, so as to avoid all the people in the world named, say, “Adolf Hitler,” to drop dead at the very same moment from a heart attack (if you’re not particularly choosy about cause of death).
Light quickly gets into the spirit of things, using the notebook to execute criminals, alleged or otherwise, in the process becoming a cultural phenom known as “Kira,” judge, jury, and executioner of Japanese criminal scum.
With the police stumped, enter the mysterious “L” from stage left, who first appears as a laptop spouting a synthesized Chipmunk voice. “L” is apparently a specialized consultant for law enforcement agencies around the globe, who has helped solve any number of seemingly unsolvable cases.
Of course.
And when “L” throws down the gauntlet in a very public manner, the stage is set for the two self-styled geniuses to match wits in a deadly chess game of move and counter-move, while Light gleefully speeds down the road to Sociopath City.

With a premise and plot that fairly screams “Comic book!!!” (and I mean the juvenile, vaguely ludicrous and improbable sort), Death Note clears the starting gate with a hell of a handicap.
The production then isn’t helped any by performances that are frankly painful to watch. The only actors who manage to rise above bad and just squeak past mediocrity are Takeshi Kaga (Chairman Kaga from Ryori No Tetsujin—the original Iron Chef!), who plays the head of the police squad investigating the Kira case, and Asaka Seto (Chakushin Ari 2: One Missed Call 2, the “Dark Hole” segment of Hak Yae: Black Night, and Hideo Nakata’s upcoming Kaidan), as the fiancé of an FBI agent.
Not only do we have bad acting from the humans, but the CGI is of the sort that isn’t 100% convincing either, thus, the scenes where Light interacts with Ryuk (invisible to everyone else who has not touched the Death Note) are distracting, bad actor bouncing off bad CGI. Not good. This is the sort of film where maintaining suspension of disbelief is like trying to break the law of gravity.

Things then get even stickier when “L” is introduced in flesh and blood form. I’ll refrain from saying who plays “L,” so there’s some mystery for those of you who plan on seeing Death Note. What I will say though, is that “L” is a character whose eccentricities feel monstrously contrived, and a large part of the fault lies in the performance, one of the most disastrous in the film. Watching “L” in action is like watching Ryuk; you just know what you’re seeing isn’t real, as there isn’t a speck of genuine honesty in the portrayal.
(Actually, I think watching Ryuk is easier. He’s CGI, so at least he’s got a valid excuse for being a great big fake.)

As events unfold, there’s a plot twist some 40 minutes into the proceedings that tantalizingly dangles the possibility that the narrative will go into some interesting, more provocative waters, but no. The twist is revealed, apparently without altering anything in the slightest. A golden opportunity to spike up tension and delve deeper into personalities and motivation is basically tossed out the window apparently without the slightest trace of regret.
One of the most bothersome aspects of all this is that we never really see why Light gets into the Death Note so intensely, he simply does. Other than a brief debate with his girlfriend Shiori (Yu Kashii) over whether Kira’s deadly vigilante actions are justified, Light just plows through the notebook’s pages like nobody’s business.
And there doesn’t even seem to be any discernable segue from his execution of criminals to his offing of the law enforcement types who are after him, no apparent remorse for his supernatural murder of the innocent. We see no reason for Light’s coldly sociopathic tendencies. You’d think we’d get to see why this particular human is apparently even more “evil” than Ryuk himself, but that simply isn’t the case.

Like the film adaptation of Devilman, Death Note leaves you with the feeling that there was just way too much material to adapt comfortably into a 2-hour long movie. In fact, Kaneko cheats by having the story split into two films, following up the tale in Death Note: The Last Name.
Thus, Death Note ends in a stupefying cliffhanger that makes a mockery of the frustratingly long 2 hours and 6 minutes that it took to get there. Those desperate for a final resolution so as to put the whole sorry mess behind them will be royally ticked off (or, at the very least, annoyed, as I was).

Parting shot: The fact that this film was so popular in Japan—so much so that it went head-to-head with one of last year’s global box office juggernauts, The Da Vinci Code, and actually came out on top for two weeks—is just one of the myriad mysteries of the movie world; “more things in heaven and earth and the multiplex,” and all that.