Post by Yuri Petrovitch on May 10, 2014 17:24:10 GMT -5
KAMEN RIDER: THE NEXT
SYNOPSIS
Whenever people hear the song "Platinum Smile," by the pop star Chiharu, they are gruesomely murdered. It is alleged there is a cursed line in the song that makes the brutal murders happen, but an attempt to ask Chiharu about this is shut down by the president of her music company, who we soon discover is an agent of Shocker, still alive two years after Takeshi Hongo and Hayato Ichimonji betrayed them and destroyed their island headquarters. Shocker is perfecting their newest plan to eliminate Hongo and Ichimonji--the Shocker Riders, an elite group of Hopper series cyborgs who are utterly loyal to Shocker (and who are standing around in helmets, scarves, and absolutely nothing else. Shocker is a puzzling organisation)
Hongo, meanwhile, is laying low and working at a high school as science teacher, where his class is full of obnoxious students (who, like in American movies, all look like they're in their mid-20s) Hongo takes an interets in one, Kotomi, who has been chronically absent from school. Kikuma, as it turns out, is Chiharu's friend and is desperately trying to find out what's happened to her. Unfortunately for her, Shocker's also aware that Kotomi's asking questions, and so send their agents to deal with her.
Chiharu, meanwhile, is having problems of her own--for one thing, there's all the weird handprint scars she has, and there's the fact that she sees severed hands everywhere and also a misshapen, bleeding version of herself with a bandaged face tends to leap out of the mirror and scare the hell out of her, all not things that you necessary want your famous pop starts suffering from. Ultimately bandaged Chiharu kills normal Chiharu and throws her off a building just as Hongo and Kitomi are coming to see her. Normal (and now dead) Chiharu explains that she is NOT in fact, Chiharu--she was a Shocker agent made up to look like her.
As Hongo and Kitomi try to digest this bombshell, a Shocker agent, Chainsaw Lizard, appears, flanked by the Shocker Riders. This forces Hongo to out himself and transform into Kamen Rider 1. Hongo manages to fight Jaguar and the Riders to a standstill and allows Kotomi and himself to escape.
Meanwhile, Ichimonji--Kamen Rider 2--is wandering the city, and he's seen better days. Unlike Hongo, Ichimonji is suffering from his body's rejection of his cybernetics (remember in The First, Shocker cyborgs needed to have their blood constantly replenished to avoid being killed by this condition) and he is running out of time. On the other hand, he's doing so in the pimpin'est way possible, buying champagne for all the honeys at a nightclub. He has to pay for it by having seizures and coughing up blood, but at least he's keeping as positive a mental attitude as is possible to have under the circumstances (i.e. being written by Toshiki Inoue)
Some punks try to grab Kitomi at the school, forcing Hongo to reveal himself as a superhuman to the school, which causes the usual freakout when someone demonstrates sudden-onset badassery. On the plus side, Kitomi is happy to have Hongo aid her in her search for the truth and maybe no call him an idiot so much. Hongo agrees to protect her and they head off to meet Chiharu's brother, Shiro Kazami. Kazami is a wunderkind, the former president of a company called ExaStream, which suffered the mysterious disappearance of its entire staff a few weeks before. Kitomi breaks into Kanzaki's house because we've gotta get things moving and finds that Kazami's is kind of a jerk but he knows his wines, which is a thing.
Meanwhile, yet another "Chiharu" is created by Shocker. Even the manager is getting rather worried at the amount of turnover with multiple versions of the same person, but the president is adamant that Chiharu must not die.
The reasons for this much wait a bit, because we're back to the Hongo, Kitomi and Kazami show, wheren it turns out this has all been a trap and Chainsaw Lizard shows up along with the Shocker Riders to bring the pain on Hongo. Kazami, annoyed by his wine, punches Hongo in the gut and activates his own henshin belt--Kazami is the Hopper cyborg, version three, or Kamen Rider V3 for short. V3 forces Hongo to retreat on his bike and the Shocker Riders pursue. While Hongo is able to fight the Shocker Riders to a standstill, V3 beats him down easily, and, with Hongo sure to be killed any second now, Ichimonji rides to save him. But before Hongo can ask Ichimonji if he's OK, he rides off.
Later, Kazami is entertaining some post-fight angst when "Platinum Smile" comes on the television, and Kitomi's words questioning if he cared about her ring in his ears. Motivated to go see her, he stops by her dressing room to see her, only to discover that Chiharu may look like his sister, but isn't. He gets thrown out, and that soon leads him to throw in with Hongo and Kitomi. Kazami explains that that the incident at ExaStream was caused by a Shocker experiment--a plague of nanomachines that would instantly convert a human into a cyborg were deployed. Only Kazami and his assistant survived, the rest of his staff died horribly, whether due to the nanotech of the ministrations of Shocker's agent Scissors Jaguar. Things end inconclusively, but Ichimonji returns to the story as the pieces line up for the final battle.
Afterwards, we check in with Chiharu #3, who is losing her mind and begging to have her face put back right. Simultaneously, Hongo and Ichimonji catch up, and a lot of homosexual subtext is lobbed around before Kazami pops in and says he'll prove himself the strongest by killing Hongo and Ichimonji. Ichimonji sneers and says that Kazami is just like he used to be, but before the Rider triple-threat can go down, Kitomi contacts them and they get the fake Chiharu to talk and explain what happened to the real one. Apparently they had decided to prank Chiharu to take her down a peg and things went rather badly, as Chiharu already had the shocker nanobots in her system and their shoving her down the stairs sent her face-first into the fusebox. Her face now burnt off, Chiharu killed herself, or so it was assumed.This leads to Kitomi having a telepathic experience (for some reason) and Kazami finally reveals that Chiharu is probably trying to stop a shipment of Shocker's nano-bots from being deployed in the city. Hongo immediately rushes off to stop him, but Kazami says that he won't help.
Hongo battles Scissors Jaguar, but only the intervention of Ichimonji and Kazami, now fighting side by side, allow them to finally destroy Scissors Jaguar and Chainsaw Lizard. Defeating them, they encounter Chiahru at last, now mutated into a monster. She begs for Kazami to kill her and free her from her curse, and while Kazami doesn't want to kill his sister, obviously having a maddened murder-beat in the family is too much of a hassle to bear too long and he does. This battle finished, Ichimonji returns to the bar with his fly ladies for one last Epicurean romp, Hongo goes back on the road with Kotomi this time, and Kazami tries to rebuild his life, now that Chiharu is dead and resting in peace . . .
. . .except after the credits, there's a good chance the murders are still happening, which means the previous hour and 44 minutes was for bloody nothing. Bleah.
ANALYSIS
We've talked about Toshiki Inoue before, here, most specifically when we talked about Kamen Rider 555. Sometimes, he works with a sufficiently deft touch that his kamen Rider episodes offer a mixture of dark thrills an heroic action that ends with the positive message at the heart of all Kamen Rider shows--that no matter what, to always keep fighting for a better world, even if that fight ensures you have no place in the world that is or the world that's coming.
That Inoue showed up for Kamen Rider: The First. It was pretty good.
Then there's the other Inoue, who is so obsessed with make everything so dark and joyless that it reduces everything that's happening to a joiyless, meaningless sludge that leaves you so depressed you wonder what the point of any of this is. In these moments, usually there is misplaced focus, a dearth of action, crises born out of ridiculous miscommunication, and people suddenly doing whatever the plot requires to advance (witness Kitomi's sudden-onset telepathy) Notions about how the world is uniformly a terrible place is the rule and generally the whole take-away is "Uhm . . .so what?"
That Inoue, sadly, showed up for Kamen Rider: The Next. Oh God is this ever bad.
I'm going to go with the positive first--V3's new look is pretty sharp, as is that of the Shocker Riders (even if they are just the suits from The First with some gold paint) Additionally, the stuntwork is incredible--it's a perfect mating of the classic, more physical and brutal Showa-era Kamen Rider action choreography and the flashier wire-work stunts that are more common today. It's really excellent work, and I really wish there had been more action set-pieces, because they're really fantastic.
OK, now, back to my main point--this movie is poo. After the ending of The First, you really wanted to see the Riders side by side as a team taking on Shocker again. As it stands, the Kamen Riders are bolted onto a fifth-rate J-Horror script and barely figure in at all. This has a few problems. For one, Hongo is basically a spectator in his own movie--he's hardly the focus and only gets sucked back into the main plot thanks to Kotomi's arc, and man, it's his good luck that Shocker happened to be behind it because otherwise, anyone could have fulfilled that role.
Second, Ichimonji's sad arc is robbed of most of its power because he figures even less into the proceedings than Hongo does. We're meant to invest a lot in his and Hongo's relationship and be sad when he finally dies, but since despite "Kamen Rider" being RIGHT THERE in the title, there is precious little Kamen Rider to be had in these proceedings, and so this gets shoved off to the side more more of the usual J-Horror cliches which were long since tired before this movie came out (stuff with mirrors! Improbable gory murders! Lots of shadows and people not talking about crazy improbable gore-murder!)
But the worst served by this is Kazami, whose intro as V3 is subsumed in this Chiharu mess, never to be recovered. It's ironic that he's referred to as "Empty" by ichimonji, especially as Kazami doesn't even have much to do with the Chiharu plot. I'm sure there exists an explanation for why so much of his presence ended up on the cutting room floor, but for God's sake, you don't get credit for something that's not in the movie, if it's not in the movie.
Thirdly, the wasted potential drips off every frame of this. After The First, you were primed to expect the sequel to feature a bigger, more extensive battle with Shocker--the presence of the Shocker Riders and V3 really seem to point to it. So why are they barely in the movie? I realise that The First series is supposed to be "darker" and "More realistic," but going to a Kamen Rider flick and getting some knockoff of The Grudge is like ordering a pizza delivery and getting a newspaper delivered instead.
Perhaps I would have liked this better had their been more action and had the threads from The First been followed up on better, but we waste so much damn time talking about Chiharu and how special she was and how sad it is that she's a monster who can kill everyone but herself (which doesn't make any sense, but there you go) and there's so much time wasted on a plot that's undeserving of so much attention (and that doesn't even get resolved in the movie, as--spoiler alert-- apparently now Chiharu's moved on to killing people who win big in pachinko machines) and just exists to fill up time.
Inoue, I am disappoint.
NEXT WEEK
The cult known as Golgom has kidnapped two step-brothers---Kotaro Minami and Nobuhiko Akizuki. Modifying them into two cyborg beings--Black Sun and Shadow Moon--Golgom's plan is that the two will fight, the winner rising to become the Creation King and rule Golgom, and through them, the Earth. But Kotaro rebeals, and vows to battle Golgom and rescue his brother.
In seven, one of the best of the Showa Era Kamen Rider series, Kamen Rider Black:
