I bestow a rating of “Meh” on 20th Century Boys
I was hoping to like this film, because it features my favorite Japanese actor Tangze Shouming (whose Japanese name I sometimes just forget), but unfortunately I found it disappointing for a few different reasons.
I found it very slow-moving. I actually had to watch it in five or so installments, because I couldn’t keep interest in it. It was also shot in a TV show style, which I guess makes sense because it was made by a television studio, but I like films to be a little more stylistically special or daring. The sort of unimaginative way it was filmed also didn’t help keep up the momentum of the narrative. Maybe another problem was that because it was based on a popular manga, they felt they had to leave in as much as possible, which contributed to making the story sort of slow-moving and digressive. Also, probably because it came from a manga, some of the acting was sort of cartoony and exaggerated, which I did not get into.
One thing that interested me was that this was a lot like a non-disgusting version of Takeshi Miike’s Multiple Personality Detective Psycho: Malice Spreads Like Disease. I mean, it is similar in that it had some of the same themes. However, I don’t want to talk about which themes too much because I don’t want to spoil either movies just in case any of the tiny number of people who read this later intend to watch either of the films.