Rating: 2.5/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 20/52 | Takashi Miike
Shinichi Ichikawa is a third-grade teacher who gives kids the creeps. We meet him sewing a zebra costume while watching Radioactive Ranger, where the Ranger fights Sadako, the girl from The Ring. That night, he dons the zebra costume he was making. But it’s no ordinary zebra costume—it is the costume of the 70s tokusatsu character Zebraman, a show that only lasted seven episodes before being canceled.
At school, a transfer student named Shinpei Asano joins Shinichi’s third-grade class. Shinichi instantly falls in love with Shinpei’s mother, Kana. Shinichi catches Shinpei drawing on his desk—it’s of Zebraman—and the two bond, inspiring Shinichi to don his costume and surprise Shinpei that evening. While out, he hears a woman scream and runs to her rescue. As Zebraman, he runs into the crab-mask serial killer. Mid-fight, Shinichi discovers he has superpowers.
The fight triggers a blip on the radar of two special agents, Segawa and Oikawa. When they investigate, they find the crab-masked man with a fist-sized hole in his face and an alien goo bubbling out of it. As Zebraman fights more baddies, they all seem to have this alien goo. What’s going on? Will Zebraman be able to stop it?
Despite whatever subtext you might read, this movie is predominantly a love letter to tokusatsu, with its weird creatures, secret military meetings, and alien invasions. The film makes several references—we even get to watch a clip from an episode of Zebraman, and it is delightful.
Like every Miike movie I’ve seen, this one is too long. I felt the pace early as the dialogue dragged and story beats took multiple scenes to develop. The inciting incident doesn’t happen until nearly 40 minutes in—fine for most movies but rough for an action comedy,
That said, the comedy translates well and many of the jokes land for someone who doesn’t speak Japanese. They’re not riotous, but I chuckled a few times. The Zebranurse theme is excellent. The George Bush joke is odd.
The movie’s message seems to be, “Yes, nerds, you are pathetic. But your obscure knowledge may save us all.” And that’s because the filmmakers didn’t think about the message. Or if they did, it got lost along the way.