Returner (2003)
Review by Bailey
Film:
DVD:

Written & Directed by Takashi Yamazaki
Starring Takeshi Kaneshiro, Ann Suzuki, Kirin Kiki, Goro Kishitani, Yukiko Okamoto

Features:

• Action coordination featurette
  
• Art direction featurette
  
• Visual effects: before and after featurette
  
• Video production diary with optional audio commentary by director Yamazaki and actor Suzuki

Released by: Columbia Tristar.
Rating: R (for language and violence)
Region: 1
Anamorphic: Yes.

My Advice: Rent it.

It's the year 2002 and we find our hero, Miyamoto (Kaneshiro) doing what he does best, cleaning up the bad guys. Miyamoto is basically a dude for hire who is bidding his time looking for the bastard who killed his childhood friend. Enter our damsel in distress, a 5'2" can of whoopass, Milly (Suzuki). From the future, the year 2084 to be exact, Milly has been sent back in time to save humanity. The future is not a happy place: all of you who think that aliens are going to invade and take over are apparently correct. Man has been fighting for over eighty years--and losing--and the last holdout of humanity is cloistered in the Tibetan mountains working on a way to save our race, i.e. the ability to go back and alter the past. After Milly's ride back she and Miyamoto cross paths in a very ballistic way, resulting in Milly "recruiting" Miyamoto to help her. From there the movie becomes a rather strange yet fulfilling ride which isn't quite over when you think it is but that's okay because it's eventually over when it needs to be.

Okay, what do you get when you cross The Terminator, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Transformers and John Woo? A fan boy's wet dream? Maybe, or this movie. Or both. This is a mashup of elements from across movie genres. Most are elements that "geeks" love just on principle. And I use the term "geek" as a self-identifying label so nobody out there needs to get their feathers ruffled. From the opening of the flick, which is pure science fiction, to our introduction to Miyamoto, which is pure badass action, this movie covers virtually everything. To add to the excitement as the movie unfolds, more sci-fi elements are revealed and the action stays fairly consistent. Throw in a dose of fairly good dialogue and a touch of comedy in the right places and this film manages to mesh together four or five exciting storytelling elements. Any one of which would catch my attention. With stylistic cinematography very reminiscent of a Woo film, a sci-fi heart and action to boot you get a slick looking film that is sure to please.

The special effects in this film were fairly good. In today's era of the Matrix movies and Lord of the Rings, the bar has been raised so high you need a Weta or ILM behind you to even have a chance at sporting grade A effects. The nice thing about the effects in this movie though is that they are good enough and the impact of the effects is mainly in the content, not in the flashy packaging. What you're seeing is what's engrossing, not in how good it looks. Suffice to say: the damn things work.

Ann Suzuki does an excellent job as Milly, especially impressive when according to the movie's official U.S. web site she was only fifteen when the movie was made. Takeshi Kaneshiro comes across as a Japanese version of Tom Cruise, very suave and very much in control of his screen presence. The thoroughly bad bad-guy Mizoguchi (Kishitani) is played as a carciature of the prototypical villain. Kishitani does a decent job with what he was given but unfortunately his character is used as film spackle to patch any plot holes or unlikely plot twists that need filling. The fact that he turns out to be the shoestring that holds the entire movie together is what holds this movie back. If writer Yamazaki had polished the story a bit, this flick would have would have scored a lot higher and would have made my top five list easily.

The extras are passable. The interview with the art director was the most informative. The others felt like those early morning radio interviews were the person being interviewed is three time zones away and has already been asked the same question twenty-two times since they got up that morning. The before and after effect featurette gives you an idea of just how much they change when mixing live-action with CGI and other effects. The sky is the thing that I noticed the most; they did some really interesting work with colors and lighting that is represented well by the transfer to DVD. There was also an interesting video diary of the shoot with commentary by directory Yamazaki and Suzuki. Very informal and relaxed.

There are definitely things I would have done differently, being the arm chair director I am, and there always seem to be continuity problems with time travel, unless James Cameron is involved, of course, but I liked this movie and I'm not ashamed to admit that the trailer get me very excited and the DVD didn't fail to deliver.