By Kosta Jaric
My how Japanese cinema never ceases to (confuse and) amaze.
Gantz 2 not only plays out like a comic book does and humans physically can’t, but it will blow you away with some of the most unique fight scenes ever seen on screen.
Gantz 2 (also known as Gantz: Perfect Answer) follows on from where the original Gantz left off. In the first film, friends Kei Kurono (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Masaru Kato (Kenichi Matsuyama) die in a train accident that then sends them into a weird semi-posthumous game run by a big black orb, which funnily enough is called Gantz (which I won’t describe any further because to see this thing will highlight just how weird the concept is). In this game, they and other quasi-deceased people must be assigned to kill aliens whereby once they receive 100 points, they can choose to re-enter the real world – which they still awkwardly seem to be a part of – or resurrect the dead (ironically a race Western cinema has been trying to kill off for decades).
Sound familiar? Like a video game perhaps? That the film was based on the every-increasingly popular manga (comic) and anime version explains that then.
If you don’t, Gantz 2 does an ultra convenient 5 minute montage of the first film so you’re not left to sit through the next 141 minutes with no idea of what is going on. Even if you don’t get it, the special effects and fight scenes are pretty kick-ass.
In this sequel, Kurono re-enters Gantz to get 100 points and resurrect Kato. Conflicting with his love for the innocent Kojima Tae (supremely overacted by Yoshitaka Yuriko) is a raging desire to kill all of the ‘black suit’ aliens. Cue an outstanding fight scene on the Tokyo subway that has a kill count higher than any Rambo sequel and could rival any blockbuster schlock without peer.
Ninomiya is an unlikely hero but he does have this certain likeability to him. Matsuyama looks like a Japanese pop star that walked onto the wrong set, but actually excels as an alien version of himself trying to kill everything in sight.
There are some over-the-top performances, and really weird choices of character (although I guess nerdy engineers and doped out hairdressers can be stone-cold alien killers too, right?) The greatest performance without fail is that of the weirdest and scariest pop-star obsessed schoolkid cum assassin Joichiro Nishi (teen heartthrob Kanata Hongô), although this could purely be because of how disturbing his smile is.
If you’re not a fan of the improbable then avoid; however if you want to have some fun with a film that’ll only make sense to you for a fleeting moment before confusion reigns in again, welcome home.
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