Death Note (2017)
One thing I want to make crystal clear from the outset: I do not care about the original Death Note. The way certain writers apply chess-like logic to a real world that resists it with every fiber of its being bothers me, so the original work doesn't appeal to me, even when it went "insane." If you think this disqualifies me from doing a proper review, there are tens of other takes that may suit your fancy. Might I suggest this from one of the stable of reviewers who replaced the late Roger Ebert? I'm watching it for the same reason I watched Dragonball Evolution (While I'm alienating everyone, the only thing I care about in that entire franchise is Bulma's hairstyles): To see what mess white people adapting anime have gotten us into this time.
Coincidentally enough, Netflix Presents Netflix Original Film Death Note (Actual opening credit progression) begins with the exact same starting point Evolution does: Bullies. Seattle high schooler who looks like a 25-year-old Light Turner (Nat Wolff) is a whiz kid who copies his homework for about 15 other students on the football team. When Light tries to stop a bully shaking a classmate down for money, he gets a right cross to the face where a teacher finds him later, discovers the copied homework, and sends him to principal. In Evolution, Goku is taught to believe in nonviolence, so he gets his revenge by having his tormentors destroy their own car by trying to beat him up (In the movie's one good scene). This one has much more R-rated methods of vengeance.
It just so happens that day, a notebook labeled "Death Note" fell from the sky and into Light's possession. While in detention, he's visited by death demon Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe with the exact flair you'd get casting Willem Dafoe as a death demon), who explains the features of Light's new book while freaking the kid out enough to trash the room (Light screams like Daffy Duck on fire in one of the movie's more amusing moments). The Death Note allows whoever uses it to kill whomever's name is written in it and select how they die as long as it follows the many many rules in the book that are skimmed over. He uses it to kill the bully who just happens to be outside assaulting someone brand new (They're in public at this point. Surely somebody's called the POLICE by now?). The bully's head is half-exploded by a ladder from a passing truck. The gruesome deaths and loose use of the F-word let you know this is for adults.
I will be tempted to use the phrase skimmed over far too many times in this review. We get a brief glimpse into Light's family life as he goes home to his police investigator father (Shea Whigham). His dad is simply wondering how he got into detention which turns to Light–and I'm just paraphrasing here–wondering, "Why did you let mom get murdered by a criminal?!" within 30 seconds. Holy shit, kid! That escalated quickly. Escalating faster is Light using the Death Note to kill the gangster that took his mother, literally using the entire setup to get a girlfriend (?!) in cigarette smoking cheerleader Mia (Margaret Qualley), and together making up a god named Kira who brings justice to the world's worst criminals. And it's extra wonderful because Light gets sex as frosting on the cake!
Four hundred deaths later (25 minutes in, by the way) and "Kira" has the attention of L (Lakeith Stanfield), an extremely eccentric man whose job as one of the world's greatest detectives pays enough to net a private jet on standby at all times and a helpful assistant named Watari (Paul Nakauchi) who micro-manages all of his awkward tics. He's narrowed Kira's location to Seattle and is working with Light's father, who is named to the Kira investigation squad. This becomes a bunch of "because the screenplay says so." Why is Light's father head of the investigation? Because he's a good investigator even though we never see any of it. The rest of the cops trash the father's office because they're perfectly okay with Kira making their jobs easy, though they never have any other problems working with him or L, a socially awkward jerk who isn't even on any local or federal payroll.
I'll stop with the blow-by-blow plot synopsis because you get the idea. For the fans of the manga and anime, this version likely will not work at all. I don't enjoy the original property much, but I understand its appeal as a carefully plotted cat-and-mouse game with huge stakes and morality debates (You know, until THAT twist). The Death Note of 2017 shrinks the main character from an antihero with a God complex to a doofus who starts all of this with good intentions matched with the need to get laid, getting in way over his head. If this didn't have worldwide ramifications like literally toppling dictators, this could just as easily be another cheaply-made monkey paw horror flick about a high school kid who'd better be careful what he wishes for. This even climaxes with prom. Okay, it's a winter ball (...on October 12th. That's homecoming. I know that and I'm almost 20 years free of high school), so the outside scenes can be in non-distinct darkness, but it has the same effect.
Director Adam Wingard (The Blair Witch remake) doesn't so much assemble a movie as bring jigsaw pieces from other puzzles and tries to make them its own picture. Most of these weird pieces involve L. Take his entrance into the film at an almost literal orgy of murder between two Japanese gangs. The scene takes place at a weird strip joint with naked bodies strewn about in bizarre locations, like people just shot up the fetish club from Matrix Revolutions. Masi Oka (Hiro from Heroes and the guy with the best Godzilla gag in Austin Powers' Goldmember iteration) shows up for five seconds as a familiar face in a detective role and vanishes, much like the entire scene. L later has a press conference in a hoodie and mask to hide his identity and there's a blatant, intentional shot of him in front of the American flag. Did Banksy take over as director of photography for a moment?
The movie as a whole has a look and a feel in Seattle's dreary landscape, but all of it never stops seeming like a movie. The school Light attends is pristine and everyone wears outfits that look like they were just bought off the rack. They establish Light as living in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, but that's one SPACIOUS bedroom for pricey Seattle. I'd take Sound Transit rattling my dinner plates for that house! The details in the room are stock as well, giving us no insight into the characters except the very basics, again reminding me that all these places are sets. Even the over-the-top deaths feel too unreal when all of this would work better if it was more grounded and realistic instead of taking notes from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.
Yet, I don't hate this movie. Likely it's because I have no affection for the source material (Those who do and take it seriously will probably rage until they burn through the entire planet), but it's well enough made that I'm not suffering through it and its many misfires have a goofy charm. If I may say something it does much better than its live-action Japanese counterpart, it handles Ryuk impressively. He's held in the shadows with blazing eyes and a sadistic smile being the dominant features. It's effective rather than the Japanese live-action version being a distraction of special effects, and Willem Dafoe voices him to perfection. The cast is made up of talented people who more or less do their job, including Lakeith Stanfield's idiosyncratic L. Even Nat Wolff isn't so much miscast and his character is misplaced. He plays a high school schlub who does about what you'd expect when a guy such as him would get these powers and not realize maybe the girl who hooks up with him over smashing a guy with a SWAT truck doesn't have the best head on her shoulders (And their DUMB dialogue still fits along the lines of awkward, uncool teenagers trying to converse). He's simply in the entirely wrong movie.
My brain was firing in all the wrong ways during this flick, but at least I was interacting with it. There are timelines that don't match up, plot elements that are supposed to build off each other that collapse in on themselves, and strange choices. Light and Ryuk wreck the detention room he's in and the teacher in charge of it never comes back and gets him in further trouble even though he's the one kid in detention. People who are Death Note'd seemingly have a switch flipped in their head that goes to complete obedience mode and I never stopped wondering how that worked. Stanfield was in the brilliant Get Out, and that made me think if the real personality was repressed or if their subconscious does this without a thought, or whatever. Later in the movie, there are long-form death note situations where a guy has 48 hours to think, "Hmmmm, why am I going out of my way to betray the person most important to me?" The weird choices all go back to L, whose backstory involves the most convoluted way to make the world's greatest detectives. Why would you go through all of this mess just to make detectives? I don't know if that was in the original or not, but damn, Kinderheim 511 from the mange/anime Monster is telling you you're trying way too hard to make geniuses.
This all builds to the climax where the filmmaking is so off the rails, it's kind of awe-inspiring. The ticking timeline makes no sense for what's happening (A major story point occurs at 7 p.m. when the winter dance is already at full steam. Do the Seattle school districts want to make sure all these kids are in bed by 10?). The action spreads to the streets involving a stolen police car, and the roads on a Saturday night are surprisingly minimal with all the population hanging out in obviously Canadian alleys... except when it changes to a foot chase where suddenly the streets are jammed wall-to-wall. The music switches between Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" (Yes, the song from Top Gun) and composers Atticus and Leopold Ross doing their best Hotline Miami impersonation. So much chaos ensues in the last minutes (Set to a Chicago song from when the band had lost all edge) that the movie forgets Light threatens a guy with a gun and could be visibly blamed by multiple witnesses for the catastrophe that follows to no punishment. What else to do but end with an Air Supply song accompanying credits impersonating the opening credits to Seven with outtakes thrown in? Only the most logical of steps, if you ask me.
What we have here is a crappy cable movie that you'd catch in the middle of the night that's still shit, yet you find yourself watching it more than you should; maybe the occasional good reason, but mostly, all the wrong ones. The only difference is it's attached to one of the largest manga properties of the past 15 years. It's at least not Dragonball Evolution in feeling like a lazy 90's adaptation with no pulse, and it's not turning one of the most badass characters into a weaboo wank fantasy played by Scarlett Johansson as if her ZzzQuil just kicked in. Death Note is interesting in how it fails and I have no ill will to anybody involved with it. If you're going to do an American Death Note movie that arbitrarily changes some of the main pillars of the franchise for poor reasons and transforming it into a high school melodrama, this is about as good as you can hope.
Coincidentally enough, Netflix Presents Netflix Original Film Death Note (Actual opening credit progression) begins with the exact same starting point Evolution does: Bullies. Seattle high schooler who looks like a 25-year-old Light Turner (Nat Wolff) is a whiz kid who copies his homework for about 15 other students on the football team. When Light tries to stop a bully shaking a classmate down for money, he gets a right cross to the face where a teacher finds him later, discovers the copied homework, and sends him to principal. In Evolution, Goku is taught to believe in nonviolence, so he gets his revenge by having his tormentors destroy their own car by trying to beat him up (In the movie's one good scene). This one has much more R-rated methods of vengeance.
It just so happens that day, a notebook labeled "Death Note" fell from the sky and into Light's possession. While in detention, he's visited by death demon Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe with the exact flair you'd get casting Willem Dafoe as a death demon), who explains the features of Light's new book while freaking the kid out enough to trash the room (Light screams like Daffy Duck on fire in one of the movie's more amusing moments). The Death Note allows whoever uses it to kill whomever's name is written in it and select how they die as long as it follows the many many rules in the book that are skimmed over. He uses it to kill the bully who just happens to be outside assaulting someone brand new (They're in public at this point. Surely somebody's called the POLICE by now?). The bully's head is half-exploded by a ladder from a passing truck. The gruesome deaths and loose use of the F-word let you know this is for adults.
I will be tempted to use the phrase skimmed over far too many times in this review. We get a brief glimpse into Light's family life as he goes home to his police investigator father (Shea Whigham). His dad is simply wondering how he got into detention which turns to Light–and I'm just paraphrasing here–wondering, "Why did you let mom get murdered by a criminal?!" within 30 seconds. Holy shit, kid! That escalated quickly. Escalating faster is Light using the Death Note to kill the gangster that took his mother, literally using the entire setup to get a girlfriend (?!) in cigarette smoking cheerleader Mia (Margaret Qualley), and together making up a god named Kira who brings justice to the world's worst criminals. And it's extra wonderful because Light gets sex as frosting on the cake!
Four hundred deaths later (25 minutes in, by the way) and "Kira" has the attention of L (Lakeith Stanfield), an extremely eccentric man whose job as one of the world's greatest detectives pays enough to net a private jet on standby at all times and a helpful assistant named Watari (Paul Nakauchi) who micro-manages all of his awkward tics. He's narrowed Kira's location to Seattle and is working with Light's father, who is named to the Kira investigation squad. This becomes a bunch of "because the screenplay says so." Why is Light's father head of the investigation? Because he's a good investigator even though we never see any of it. The rest of the cops trash the father's office because they're perfectly okay with Kira making their jobs easy, though they never have any other problems working with him or L, a socially awkward jerk who isn't even on any local or federal payroll.
I'll stop with the blow-by-blow plot synopsis because you get the idea. For the fans of the manga and anime, this version likely will not work at all. I don't enjoy the original property much, but I understand its appeal as a carefully plotted cat-and-mouse game with huge stakes and morality debates (You know, until THAT twist). The Death Note of 2017 shrinks the main character from an antihero with a God complex to a doofus who starts all of this with good intentions matched with the need to get laid, getting in way over his head. If this didn't have worldwide ramifications like literally toppling dictators, this could just as easily be another cheaply-made monkey paw horror flick about a high school kid who'd better be careful what he wishes for. This even climaxes with prom. Okay, it's a winter ball (...on October 12th. That's homecoming. I know that and I'm almost 20 years free of high school), so the outside scenes can be in non-distinct darkness, but it has the same effect.
Director Adam Wingard (The Blair Witch remake) doesn't so much assemble a movie as bring jigsaw pieces from other puzzles and tries to make them its own picture. Most of these weird pieces involve L. Take his entrance into the film at an almost literal orgy of murder between two Japanese gangs. The scene takes place at a weird strip joint with naked bodies strewn about in bizarre locations, like people just shot up the fetish club from Matrix Revolutions. Masi Oka (Hiro from Heroes and the guy with the best Godzilla gag in Austin Powers' Goldmember iteration) shows up for five seconds as a familiar face in a detective role and vanishes, much like the entire scene. L later has a press conference in a hoodie and mask to hide his identity and there's a blatant, intentional shot of him in front of the American flag. Did Banksy take over as director of photography for a moment?
The movie as a whole has a look and a feel in Seattle's dreary landscape, but all of it never stops seeming like a movie. The school Light attends is pristine and everyone wears outfits that look like they were just bought off the rack. They establish Light as living in a lower-middle-class neighborhood, but that's one SPACIOUS bedroom for pricey Seattle. I'd take Sound Transit rattling my dinner plates for that house! The details in the room are stock as well, giving us no insight into the characters except the very basics, again reminding me that all these places are sets. Even the over-the-top deaths feel too unreal when all of this would work better if it was more grounded and realistic instead of taking notes from M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening.
Yet, I don't hate this movie. Likely it's because I have no affection for the source material (Those who do and take it seriously will probably rage until they burn through the entire planet), but it's well enough made that I'm not suffering through it and its many misfires have a goofy charm. If I may say something it does much better than its live-action Japanese counterpart, it handles Ryuk impressively. He's held in the shadows with blazing eyes and a sadistic smile being the dominant features. It's effective rather than the Japanese live-action version being a distraction of special effects, and Willem Dafoe voices him to perfection. The cast is made up of talented people who more or less do their job, including Lakeith Stanfield's idiosyncratic L. Even Nat Wolff isn't so much miscast and his character is misplaced. He plays a high school schlub who does about what you'd expect when a guy such as him would get these powers and not realize maybe the girl who hooks up with him over smashing a guy with a SWAT truck doesn't have the best head on her shoulders (And their DUMB dialogue still fits along the lines of awkward, uncool teenagers trying to converse). He's simply in the entirely wrong movie.
My brain was firing in all the wrong ways during this flick, but at least I was interacting with it. There are timelines that don't match up, plot elements that are supposed to build off each other that collapse in on themselves, and strange choices. Light and Ryuk wreck the detention room he's in and the teacher in charge of it never comes back and gets him in further trouble even though he's the one kid in detention. People who are Death Note'd seemingly have a switch flipped in their head that goes to complete obedience mode and I never stopped wondering how that worked. Stanfield was in the brilliant Get Out, and that made me think if the real personality was repressed or if their subconscious does this without a thought, or whatever. Later in the movie, there are long-form death note situations where a guy has 48 hours to think, "Hmmmm, why am I going out of my way to betray the person most important to me?" The weird choices all go back to L, whose backstory involves the most convoluted way to make the world's greatest detectives. Why would you go through all of this mess just to make detectives? I don't know if that was in the original or not, but damn, Kinderheim 511 from the mange/anime Monster is telling you you're trying way too hard to make geniuses.
This all builds to the climax where the filmmaking is so off the rails, it's kind of awe-inspiring. The ticking timeline makes no sense for what's happening (A major story point occurs at 7 p.m. when the winter dance is already at full steam. Do the Seattle school districts want to make sure all these kids are in bed by 10?). The action spreads to the streets involving a stolen police car, and the roads on a Saturday night are surprisingly minimal with all the population hanging out in obviously Canadian alleys... except when it changes to a foot chase where suddenly the streets are jammed wall-to-wall. The music switches between Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" (Yes, the song from Top Gun) and composers Atticus and Leopold Ross doing their best Hotline Miami impersonation. So much chaos ensues in the last minutes (Set to a Chicago song from when the band had lost all edge) that the movie forgets Light threatens a guy with a gun and could be visibly blamed by multiple witnesses for the catastrophe that follows to no punishment. What else to do but end with an Air Supply song accompanying credits impersonating the opening credits to Seven with outtakes thrown in? Only the most logical of steps, if you ask me.
What we have here is a crappy cable movie that you'd catch in the middle of the night that's still shit, yet you find yourself watching it more than you should; maybe the occasional good reason, but mostly, all the wrong ones. The only difference is it's attached to one of the largest manga properties of the past 15 years. It's at least not Dragonball Evolution in feeling like a lazy 90's adaptation with no pulse, and it's not turning one of the most badass characters into a weaboo wank fantasy played by Scarlett Johansson as if her ZzzQuil just kicked in. Death Note is interesting in how it fails and I have no ill will to anybody involved with it. If you're going to do an American Death Note movie that arbitrarily changes some of the main pillars of the franchise for poor reasons and transforming it into a high school melodrama, this is about as good as you can hope.
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