Tone Deaf Note

Breaking new ground is a treacherous business. Literally and figuratively; you could end up sticking a pickaxe into and electric conduit and that’s your lot buddy; you’re left doing a spot on impression of Luke’s Uncle and Aunt after Stormtroopers dropped round for a glass of blue milk (which I never realised was blue until someone told me because of my genetically inferior retinas) and for a split second you genuinely regret not checking with town planning officers more thoroughly. In my case, it just means watching a bunch of stuff I ordinarily wouldn’t. Not just individual films like Ghostbusters; that sits nicely in my niche actually, it was just a woeful, heaped turd of a movie.

I don’t watch a lot of anime, particularly not episodic ones. No detriment to anime as a genre, there are some classics out there that are fantastic movies, but I just can’t get into it in the same fanatical way that other people do. I’ve never watched Bleach, Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist or any of that stuff. I had a pop at Kill La Kill because I got told it was brilliant but I just found it annoying enough that after about three episodes I’d switched it off and settled down to watch back to back episodes of River Monsters on Netflix because why wouldn’t you want to watch a programme about giant fish presented as terrifying predatory monsters? Anyway, I’m not really a connoisseur.

Netflix has been cranking out its own shows and movies at a fairly decent rate to a varied response.  The shows seem to be doing better than the movies, especially the Marvel stuff. Fairly demonstrably though, the movies they’re throwing themselves behind are a lot less rigorous in their quality control department it seems. By which I mean for the most part they’ve been a bit gash and not just because a bunch of them have Adam Sandler in them. How do these two things coincide, the more deductive of you may be wondering?

Death Note.

In the all-encompassing scramble to remake every movie that was ever made, particularly if it was either incredibly popular or originally in a foreign language, Netflix turned its cheque-signing-hand towards an anime that sold and continues to sell countless copies of the original manga. Fair play, you might say. They did Ghost in the Shell not so long ago and that wasn’t horrendous. You might be tempted to think these thoughts until you realise they already made live Death Note into no less than four live action movies already. Then it starts becoming a bit clearer; we haven’t had an American Death Note live action movie so how could it possibly count? I wish I was joking and just being snippy at this point but it’s so horribly obvious.

I kind of went around this arse-backward. My girlfriend is much better versed in Japanese animation and was intrigued by the newest live action Death Note movie when we happened upon it. I swear I spend more time flicking past countless documentaries on Serial Killer Children and  movies even your local supermarket wouldn’t stick in the bargain bin for a quid than  actually watching anything, but that’s an entirely separate issue. So I sat through Death Note and spent about an hour and forty minutes scowling at a movie that was horribly put together regardless of whether it was accurate to the source material or not. Having no frame of reference, I did the honourable thing and churned my way through 37 episodes of the Death Note anime that is also thankfully on Netflix. No need to thank me, I’m a trooper not a martyr.

Death Note itself is a not-too-bad detective thriller it turns out. I’d have thought from the limited amount I’d seen it would have been a lot more supernatural than it was, especially considering the most recognisable character in it is a literal God of Death. Sure it’s really convoluted, far too complicated for its own good and relies on healthy doses of Deus ex Machina to drag itself out of tight spots; It genuinely seems like the only way some of the characters get to the conclusions they do is because they’ve probably read ahead in the screenplay. It’s sort of similar to Infernal Affairs or its Americanisation the Departed in how our protagonist Light ends up investigating himself for crimes that at one point he purposefully makes himself forget he did so he can eliminate himself as a suspect and then carry on later. It never fully works because his nemesis L seems to magically predict every possible move Light make and is always on the money. It’s a touch frustrating for that; they never really stray far from the path as it were before diving back in to suspecting Light right until the end and he out-douches himself for the final time. Key points though: Light is a genius, megalomaniac dick. L is a genius, socially awkward dick. Light’s girlfriend Misa is an annoying teenage pop star/model/movie actress dick. Ryuk is an ambivalent, mostly invisible Death God dick. There are a lot of dicks in this anime, but not half as much as in the latest incarnation. Oh my. Your average Genito-Urinary Medicine nurse hasn’t seen this many dicks in one place, but at least they’re interesting.

American Light is just a dick. None of the character traits that making him so compelling in the manga and anime have survived translation. He’s a whiny little nerd who misses his Mum who sets out to get revenge on the mobster who killed her and got away with it. Except that he has to be pushed into it by Ryuk who seems to be a cunning and devious sort of trickster dick rather than the bored and possibly slightly mental Death God dick from the original. Misa becomes Mia and en route ends up a horrendous calculating typical cheerleader dick. It’s just mis-step after mis-step in a badly muddled together shitshow riddled with teenage hormones. It’s also fairly astonishing that in an entire movie that effectively whitewashes not just the characters but the whole premise , they sort of fill the equality and diversity quota by casting L with a black actor. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that at all , if you haven’t already just replaced the rest of the Japanese cast with white people because at that point it just looks like you’re doing it so people don’t complain. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned my stance on this before, but just in case you missed it; I have no problem with who gets cast doing what so long as they do a good job, so the fact the character is now a sort of jittery sugar-addict rather than the calculating human computer he was originally is baffling at best. Basically the whole thing is so far removed from the original, it’s just another crappy high school horror thriller borrowing the Death Note logo for viewing figures. It's the Netflix version of clickbait. Netflix-bait. You're welcome.

It’s such a giant waste of time. If you’re already a Death Note fan, just avoid it. You’ll end up all angry, knock your SDCC Comic Con Exclusive Light and L Pop Vinyls over and if you knacker the boxes they’ll decrease in value to less than you paid for them. If you’re a fan of horror movies you can avoid it too; the gore that’s there is fairly impressive but there’s barely any of it really and not much else to sustain your interest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to rush out and buy a Death Note t-shirt and Ryuk plushy, but even I think it deserved better than this. If this is what they have in mind for Akira they need to go and have a good long think about what they’re doing.