Death Note (2017)

Death Note is a new adaptation of a well-liked anime series from Japan, based on the premise of a book that kills anyone whose name you write in it, and also that the two smartest people in the world just happen to be Japanese teenagers. Though here, it's done in English and with all American actors in an American high school setting.

As you all know, anime fans traditionally love it when American directors put a bunch of loud white kids in adaptations of their favorite things, so I'm sure this went over really well. Let me check the internet comments and reactions to this and I'll get back to you!

Director: Adam Wingard

Starring: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

Okay, it turns out I was wrong and a lot of people really hate it – and for a lot more reasons than the generalization I just made in the first paragraph. I sure didn't know that before sitting down to do a review of it!

This thing starts off with a normal American high school, with people cheerleading and playing football while a sappy alt rock song whines over-top. It's not really all that befitting of this story.

How did the anime start again?

Huh. A bit different, then. But I am not one to dwell on petty differences. Let's move on to extreme differences, like main character Light, now played by Nat Wolff of Paper Towns and The Fault In Our Stars. Those were great films and he's a very promising actor – who also happens to be completely unfitting for this role.

I mean, he just isn't at all what this character should have been. I wouldn't be complaining that much if it was a well-written role, but instead of the cunning mastermind of the original series, he kinda acts like a character out of a Judd Apatow film. He's just kind of a bumbling goofball, and doesn't come off as terribly smart or interesting in any way. One of the first scenes is of him getting in a fight to defend this girl from bullies, and then the school rewards him for that by giving him detention for having a bunch of papers he was writing for other kids in his backpack. Some people just have no chill.

Then he finds the Death Note, the magic book that lets him kill whoever he wants as long as he writes down their name while thinking about their face. Gee. Hope he doesn't mistake this for a diary and write about any crushes of his, right? That would be a real fuck up. Apparently there are like 100 different “rules” in the Death Note, which must be boring as fuck to read. I mean, I'm surprised Light just doesn't skim through it in a “TL, DR” way. Why don't the Death Note makers just put it in Instagram form instead? That would truly reach the millennial generation.

ZZZZzzzzZZZZZ...

The death god Ryuk then appears in the school, the only supernatural being that looks exactly like Willem Dafoe. I find it funny that Dafoe voiced this character and did not act as him – considering Ryuk is one of the only characters in existence, along with the Green Goblin, seemingly written specifically with Dafoe's distinctive face in mind.

Dafoe was too talented to actually appear in the movie.

This causes Light to scream like a little girl and hide underneath a desk for a scene that goes on quite a long time for a movie that seems to want this character to be cool or badass. Not really a great way to show THAT...

I guess he to write down the name of this idiot bully at school, having him decapitated by a ladder that falls off a truck after a crash – did we just slip into a Final Destination movie?

At home, Light gets into a totally natural and realistic conversation with his father, who is a cop. They talk about how Light's mom was killed by a random mafia gangster type of guy at some time in the past, because that happens all the fucking time in America in the modern day.

Then of course there's that old cliché family drama that only happens when a gangster kills your mom – there are no other ways to create authentic drama between family members, after all. I hope you liked this bit of pointlessly transparent exposition – because it won't lead to any meaningful character development. Light has the gangster guy killed off a few minutes later in a horribly violent way while eating dinner at a fancy restaurant. Glad this was in the movie at all!

The dad comes to see him a few minutes later, barging into the room without warning, and it's like geez Dad, I could've been either masturbating OR writing in a death book in here, don't you know the meaning of privacy?

The next day he decides to tell this hot chick he likes, Mia, about the Death Note and how he can kill people with it. He's lucky she is absolutely batshit insane and sociopathic. Most girls would have walked the other way, but due to the lazy writing, she's a crazy girl and wants to kill people too – and also apparently has no problem with Light talking to an invisible death god. He sure got lucky with this one.

I guess after this, the movie turns into Natural Born Killers for idiots, with the two of them scheming and plotting and killing a bunch of bad guys all over the world. Honestly, this is where the movie lost us – do these kids really seem like the types to care about bad guys all over the world? Do they even seem organized enough to pull that off? They seem to me more like they'd be sitting behind the gym smoking weed than anything else.

"Hey, want to make out while listening to My Chemical Romance albums?"
"Sure..."

I guess Light's dad gets pulled into the investigation, because why wouldn't a random city police detective be working on a worldwide mass-murder investigation? It just makes sense. There's a few other characters introduced, like L, a super detective mastermind who is hell-bent on catching Light because... I guess he has nothing better to do. There's also his right hand man Watari, who gives out business cards with nothing but his own name on them:

Yup. No contact information. No description of what services he offers. No titles... just a name. That's all this guy needs because he is super cool.

L is a weird, quirky detective who has oddball mannerisms, and he's actually pretty cool for the most part – until Light mind-controls Watari to go find his name. This leads Watari to go to a random house in the middle of the woods, where L was once an orphan trained to be a master detective there. If this is all sounding like drunk mad libs for a parody of a crime thriller on South Park or some shit, well, that's because it very well could be. Except here there's no self awareness. Actor Lakeith Stanfield, playing L, is actually very good, and I hope he gets into more things that utilize his talents better than this mess.

More press conferences should be given by weird ninjas with the American flag behind them.

Except, uh oh, it turns out Mia has gone rogue and wants to keep killing, so she just lets him die by hails of gunfire, I guess! This is really the conflict in the last half, Light and Mia now against each other. It isn't done terribly well – but we'll get back to that in a minute.

For now, let's just check out the super long-ass chase scene between L and Light, which has finally boiled over into the proper action-movie stylings that a story about a teenager getting a notebook that kills people deserves. I'm amazed at how long this chase scene goes. Marathon runners wouldn't be able to do this shit – Usain Bolt would be tapping out for a break at some point. These guys, who spend most of the movie sitting down, are now apparently amazing athletes!

But that isn't really the point of the climax here. The climax gets to a head when Light meets Mia in this random ferris wheel at the dock, and the two fight it out over who's really going to get the book. This results in a comically over the top fight between them that really just sounds like any other teenage couple fight. I fondly remember fighting with my high school girlfriend over who was going to kill people more efficiently. It's totally ridiculous and almost impossible to take seriously as any kind of drama.

I suppose their fight was so ridiculous and terrible that it actually breaks the wheel down and causes it to fall – Mia to her death, I guess, and Light to hospitalization.

I guess, in one of the only moments in the film that actually recalls the source material, Light has actually masterminded everything so he could keep control of the Death Note, even going so far as to get some other guy to write names in it for him while he's in the hospital! Wow! Now that's a message in this fucking movie I can get behind finally – get somebody else to do the hard work for you.

So, yeah... it sucked. Bad writing, no clear character motivations, characters that seemed to change through the film purely at the whim of how smart the writing dictated them to be, and a lot of quite funny attempts at drama. This is just a bad movie. I guess I've seen worse? I mean, if that's a positive for you, that worse movies than this exist. But if you're looking for a good movie, look elsewhere.

And if you're looking for a good anime adaptation, uh, maybe stay far away from this, as if it were some Chernobyl-radioactive piece of cinema threatening to deform you and make you sterile. I don't get how these directors keep fucking up these anime movies. It'd be one thing if they made good films that were just different, but this kind of goofy shit is just bizarre – anime is from a different culture and maybe we just shouldn't try. It's OK to admit something is just different from your own world-view or culture - you don't have to fucking remake every single thing, you know.

But who am I kidding? I'm just screaming in the wind here. They're gonna keep making them.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

Battle Royale (2000)

Battle Royale is a Japanese film, which means I enjoy it if only for the fact that Japan is the only place in the world that makes my home state of Florida look sober. This is a well known movie if only for the fact that it was made in a glorious time before things got so politically correct and now we can't show school children murdering each other on screen anymore. Oh the halcyon days.

Director: Kinji Fukasaku

Starring: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Takeshi Kitano

IMDb

So this is about a weird alternative universe where the Japanese school system is so fed up with misbehaving children that it allows one depraved maniac to take an entire group of them to a deserted island and force them all to kill each other. In other words, it's every teacher's fantasy come to life. And let me tell you, these are some awful, rotten kids. Just look at this:

These fucking monsters need to die now!

So of course, the whole class gets gassed on a school bus, kidnapped and taken to a dark secluded location on an island where they're told they have to start murdering one another until only one remains! Man, detention is starting to look pretty good right now, huh?

They show how serious they are by throwing a knife and hitting one girl square in the head, and making another kid blow up via a weird necklace all of them are wearing. Jesus fucking Christ. Who built these things?

It's insane how serious they are about this. They passed a fucking governmental bill to fund this! I guess solving homelessness, poverty or crime wasn't that important in Japan. How did that conversation go?

TEACHER A: These fucking kids are out of control! One of them stabbed me in the leg the other day!

TEACHER B: Gee willikers, that's fucked up! How about we call the police on that one kid and have him put in juvenile detention center for a while?

TEACHER A: Nah, that's not good enough. I think I'm going to quit my job and become the head of this military group to take the entire class to an island and make them kill each other! And they'll all wear monitor neckbraces so we can know where they are at all times and kill them remotely if we have to!

TEACHER B: Don't you think that's a little overkill...

TEACHER A: Silence!

Also, in case you didn't realize – there are a lot of goddamn characters in this movie. Too many, in fact. I can't keep them all straight, save for the main kid, Nanahara, whose father killed himself and the lead girl, Noriko. That's really one of the film's problems... it's too hard to keep all these characters straight. It's not too big of a deal, since the emphasis is on the violence and mayhem more than characters. But unless you're really into teenage high school drama, I doubt any of these characters' emotional arcs will stick with you.

Most of the movie is just these kids running around on the island murdering each other in horrific ways – via machine guns, swords, who knows what else. They have three days to do all this and every couple of hours, Kitano, the sadistic teacher running this, announces the names of everyone who died. The violence is pretty goddamn over the top, with tons of heads blown up, giant sprays of blood, heads cut off – pretty much everything they could throw in, you'll find here.

I do like how ready some of these kids were to go all-out like that. Clearly, they picked the right kids! These kids never gave a fuck about an education. They were too busy tearing the heads off their little siblings' dolls and action figures and studying human anatomy way too intently. These kids were a little TOO excited to start chasing each other with katanas and assault rifles.

Nanahara and Noriko meet up with an older kid, Kawada, who they find out has won the game in the past, but is now back in – I just love how this guy looks like a Mini-Me Japanese version of a Bruce Willis 80s action hero, complete with ripped sleeves, an open shirt and a bandana around his head. He smokes a lot, too. That's how we know he's SUPER cool!

There's a scene where a bunch of teenage schoolgirls kill each other with machine guns in a tight space. Or as I like to call it, the most Japanese thing I've ever seen. Seriously – this is like a ridiculous caricature of the crazy shit they like to put in movies. It's like if an American action movie had a guy killing a Nazi with a bald eagle's beak and then he goes and eats a piece of apple pie after – just everything summed up in one crazy image!

But then there are also a bunch of other scenes where they try to have some kind of depth... it's really kinda surreal. Like several scenes, they have a kid dying in front of a girl and then professing some cheesy kind of love for her. It's seriously meant to be touching – and after all the other violence! Sorry, but I can't take it seriously after watching the previous scene of a bunch of schoolgirls in uniforms murder each other. Sorry if that doesn't put me in the mood!

They get down to like five people, and have a few more battles that predictably end in more gore and violence – a big surprise, if you just turned the movie on now. Then it's just down to Nanahara, Noriko and Kawada. Nanahara reflects peacefully on life, musing that for SOME REASON he's never trusted adults for most of his life. I'm sure this experience, then, has been nothing but positive for him.

Then Kawada turns on them, proclaiming it was all a trick and he just thought they were good scapegoats to lead to the end of the game. Some gunshots are heard by the guys in control over the kids' microphone neck-braces, but nothing is seen...

Then Kawada comes back and meets Kitano, and they have a pretty over-long conversation about how he was doing all of it to avenge his lost girlfriend. My favorite part of this nonsense is when Kitano reveals this wacky cartoon drawing he did of a bunch of dead kids with one still standing on a mountain. Are we sure this guy should have EVER been a teacher? I think someone needs to do a fucking background check on this guy.

Nanahara and Noriko bust in and they stage a coup and start yet another gun-fight with Kitano. Both Kawada and Kitano take a bunch of bullets. Kitano gets up, somehow, at the end, to make a phone call to his daughter, eat a cookie, and then die... okay then? What a weird fucking sequence.

These two pictures are in order. Never underestimate the power of cookies to sustain life beyond death.

On a boat later, Kawada gives a traditionally sappy-ass speech about his lost girlfriend and dies, too, from the bullet wounds. Later on, we see that Nanahara and Noriko leave society for good and now carry weapons at all times just out of straight up fear. Awesome. Now I'm seeing the positive benefits of this game. I'm so glad the Japanese government made THIS program legal...

So apparently, this movie was controversial because of a rise of violent crime that arose after its release, which conservative politicians, surprise surprise, tied to the violence in the film. Which is, you know, true. Every time I see a movie with violence in it, I go out and commit a crime. And those who know history know that the Mongols and Genghis Khan committed all their atrocities after watching violent movies. Violent media is the only reason any violence happens. Humans are pacifists otherwise.

Honestly, this movie was pretty decent. I didn't love it, but it was entertaining enough due to its wanton violence and energy – just a gleeful good time. It went on too long, though – two hours is way too much for something this one-dimensional. It did try at some other things like drama and character development, but I just didn't feel like either one was done all that well. While parts were fun, other parts did come off as a bit soggy or dull, especially the longer it dragged on. This should have been maybe 90 minutes, not two hours.

And also, it really sucks that this movie ripped off The Hunger Games so hard! That really downsizes it a few letter grades to me.

Images copyright of their original owners, I own none of them.