Takashi Miike is a great director when he’s on the ball, but
it has to be said that some of his films tend to come out lacking. The man has
directed something like a hundred movies, averaging two or three a year, so
there is a definite divide between the good ones and the bad ones. Oddly it’s
the seemingly bigger budget, more mainstream films of his that turn out to be
the weaker ones. When he’s got creative control and seemingly modest budgets he
pumps out all sorts of amazing weirdness, but when it seems he has to adhere to
more strict rules and guidelines his films tend to be a bit weak, often lacking
his sense of style and excess. Yatterman is one of the weaker ones, despite the
apparent budget and great style and technical polish. It’s a strange movie, but
not in the same way Miike’s better films tend to be. At times it seems to
capture what I assume to be the spirit of the source material, being like a fun
live-action cartoon, but otherwise it’s all over the place with a fluctuating
tone, nothing plot, failed humour, some annoying characters and an overall
messiness that prevents the random parts of the movie from coming together well.
It’s a shame because I actually enjoy a lot of the movie – it can be fun if you
can tolerate it’s cringe worthy parts- but those off parts drag it down and
make it weaker as a whole, leaving Yatterman only an ok movie at best.
Yatterman is a film adaptation of a seventies anime series
of the same name. From what I can tell it was an old Japanese Saturday Morning
cartoon series about a masked crime fighting duo named Yatterman. That’s
essentially what the movie is about, but it seems to assume the audience is
familiar with the cartoon. It’s actually a really good looking movie. While
some of the CGI is unconvincing (I hate Toybotty) a lot of it works, and the
physical props look great, like oversized toys. The action scenes tend to be
fun as well. What brings it all down is how absolutely dull and horrible the
writing, dialogue and characters tend to be. While some characters are weird
and wacky, for the most part things are dull as hell. It has a weird problem
with tone, at times seeming to match the energetic wackiness of a live-action
cartoon, while at other times it gets oddly dull and serious. It alternates from
moments of fun to dragged-out awkward parts. All in all it doesn’t quite work.
Both team Yatterman and the Doronbo Gang are vying for the
pieces of the Skull Stone, a mystical object that, if put together, is said to
cause a miracle to happen for the user. As the pieces are found, things around
the world begin to disappear. Gan and Ai are accompanied by Shoko, a sullen
girl whose father, renowned archaeologist Dr Kaieda, went missing searching for
pieces of the Skull Stone. Things get further complicated for everybody when
Gan accidentally kisses Doronjo, creating a strange love triangle that causes
tension among both teams.
The story is barely there and unimportant, more of an excuse
to have the various actions scenes. This means a lot of the movie is based
around the characters interacting with each other, which is a problem because
that also happens to be the weakest part of the movie. We never actually learn
anything important about Gan or Ai, and so we never really care about them or
what happens to them. When they start doing the ‘Gan and Ai’s relationship is
in trouble’ nonsense you won’t care because you never cared about them from the
beginning. Gan is a total idiot. He’s stupid, impulsive, is completely unable
to read the mood or understand other people’s feelings and has an idiot’s sort
of enthusiasm to everything. Most of the character drama is because of him. Ai,
on the other hand, is immensely dull, her entire character just involving her
supporting and following Gan. She has almost no personality. Doronjo, on the
other hand, is more fun but highly insecure because she wants to find a
boyfriend and get married. She ends up falling for Gan, which leads to a weird
love triangle subplot that goes nowhere. Of all the characters she’s the only
one to get some actual development. Her flunkies offer weird comic relief that
might offer a chuckle or two, but even they make things awkward at times as
some of the humour really doesn’t work, either being too obvious, too immature
or simply not funny.
The movie spends way more time with is villains than with
its heroes. I’d say we spend maybe double the time hanging out with the Doronbo
gang than we do with team Yatterman. I do have to say though that the Doronbo
gang is more interesting, since the scenes with just Team Yatterman and Shoko
are often boring. Speaking of Shoko, she’s is just so horrible and boring and
easily the weakest part of the movie. She’s sullen and spends all her time
moping about how her father has disappeared. She sucks the light-hearted joy
out of the movie whenever she appears. I have to say despite the lack of
characterisation or development for most of the characters, most of the actors
really give it their all. In particular the villains seem to be having a lot of
fun. The heroes less so. Gan does pretty
good as the bumbling heroic idiot, while Ai mostly gets upset with him and
Shoko has nothing to do but mope around.
The Doronbo scams are absurd, if only because they seem to
have required far too much actual work and effort to really be scams. One of
them involves making wedding dresses and selling them. That’s literally the
entire ‘scam’. Another involves overcharging for sushi at a sushi train
restaurant by tricking people, but to get to that point they had to actually
open and run a successful sushi restaurant. It seems like a lot of actual
effort into running legitimate businesses before they pull the scam. Outside of
that, they don’t really do much. The main plot is essentially a McGuffin hunt
(‘let’s find the magic thing for reasons!’) which isn’t very interesting at
all. You won’t care about it, and the film doesn’t seem to care either.
The movie is pretty self-aware, constantly breaking the
fourth wall and occasionally poking fun at its own nonsense and source material
(there’s a line that “Yatterman fights crime every Saturday morning at six
o’clock” that seems to reference the show). There are a few scenes that show
how uncomfortable it must be to ride around in a mecha, how utterly weird/pointlessly
bizarre everything is and how little characters seem to notice or care that
their antics are insane (a few scenes of team Yatterman being enthusiastic
about something ridiculous or dangerous are juxtaposed by Shoko looking on in
horror). Everybody fights with toys or absurd and ridiculous weapons. In fact
the manic style is endearing in its own way – that part actually sort of works.
It just doesn’t really fit with anything else. It’s often dull in its character
moments, and the actual story is nothing but time wasting with no real sense of
adventure or danger.
The movie has a big problem with tone. For the most part
it’s light and silly, like the live-action cartoon it’s meant to be, but
sometimes it gets oddly sullen (I blame Shoko). It’s also ridiculously sexual.
Everything to do with Doronjo is risqué (her outfit is basically comprised of
leather and fishnet stockings, and she’s the focus of some pervy shots). For a
kid’s/family movie (or at least something based on a kid’s cartoon) there’s a
lot of really inappropriate stuff going on. One of the Doronbo Gang’s robots is
in the shape of a woman with giant breasts and elongated nipples (they’re machine
guns). Actually everything about the lady robot fight scene is absurdly sexual,
from the moans it makes, the way it fondles its robot breasts to fire guns and
even how it ends up being defeated. It’s not something comfortable to watch,
and not something you’d want kids to see and it gives an odd flavour to things.
I actually don’t really know if referring to it as a kid’s movie is the right
thing to do, since it really hard to tell who it’s meant for – some aspects
seemed aimed at children (ugh, Toybotty) who wouldn’t be familiar with the
source material, while a lot of the jokes are adult-orientated (there is a lot
of innuendo and sex jokes) and the entire film seems full of references made
for those familiar with the series. This uneven tone does cause problems, since
a lot of it is overly childish. I actually can’t tell who the movie is meant to
be targeted to.
It’s a movie brought down by small things. The weird
emotional love triangle thing boils over weirdly, descending into silly drama
before the characters actually decide to move on with it and pretend it never
happened, making the already dull story even more of a non-entity. The fetch
quest for skull pieces doesn’t really matter at all, and even the ending is
weak (thanks to Shoko). There’s a fair amount of annoying nonsense as well.
Toybotty, the stupid looking CGI robot, flits around the screen ending every
sentence with ‘botty’. This is annoying. Similarly evil Skullobey ends every
sentence with ‘obey’. This is also annoying.
Stylistically, it’s colourful and ridiculous and I quite
liked it. I found the high colour palette appealing and I really liked the
ridiculously silly designs of the various secret bases, full of giant nonsense
gears and oversized tools. Even better was the inside of the evil Chef-based
mecha, which just had a microwave and blender. There’s a lot of weird silly
nonsense going on. The Doronjo gang sing a song with bad choreography about how
they like being evil. The Yatterman duo sing a song about being the Yatterman
duo. Both are odd and a little out of place (and also too long). A lot of the
movie is exactly like that - at times its energy and humour does work, but more
often than not it doesn’t, being either too awkward, childish or just not funny.
It also doesn’t really feel much like a Takashi Miike film, lacking some of his
signature style and film making work. While there are moments that are
Miike-ish, for the most part it seems completely different to the movies he
typically makes.
Yatterman is an odd movie, even in Miike’s filmography. It’s
mostly colourful, vibrant and ridiculous, but the bad script, those few dull/annoying
characters and its weird tonal shifts make it so much weaker. Depending on your
appreciation of cartoon nonsense and your tolerance of its problems, it can
still be a fun movie but it never rises above being average. I am curious as to
how I would’ve felt about the film if I was familiar with the original cartoon
– I can’t tell how faithful to the original the characters or overall style
are, not that I think it’d change my opinion on the film much.
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