Returner
April 2004 Reviewed by: Josh Barber Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

You have to admire truth in advertising. Notice that this movie is called Returner, not Keeper. It may be a Rental, but not much more.

Returner is billed as a live-action animé, but I'm not sure what the difference is between "live-action animé" and "second-rate action flick." Actually, I'm being a bit too harsh: Returner may not be the most creative endeavor ever, but it does have its enjoyable moments.

The year is 2084, and humankind is on the verge of extinction. An alien race, which humans call the Daggra, have been attacking for decades, and man is prepping for his last stand in the mountains of Tibet. Impenetrable shields protect the aliens from even our most advanced weaponry, while they pick us off at will. So Jeff Goldblum has to find a way to deactivate the mother ship and -- wait, no, that’s just the plot from which this part was lifted. My bad.

The plan is to send one soldier back in time to prevent the fateful first contact. That soldier is apparently a young girl named Milly, and she needs to protect Sarah Conner from the robot assass . . . Oops! I did it again. I really have to watch it.

Sent back to the year 2002, she finds herself in the middle of a gang war. Trenchcoat-clad gunslinger Miyamoto is fighting the Agents, computer programs that -- sorry, I will stop now. Miyamoto is hunting Mizoguchi, a middle-management yakuza who seems to be Vice President of Child Slavery.

Milly eventually convinces Miyamoto to help her find the evil alien, which works out in his favor when Mizoguchi turns up in the middle of things. Lots of gun battles, flashbacks, and creative stunts ensue. Though the plot is quite derivative, it has some very good moments and more than a few surprises tucked into its predictability.

The actors are quite good for a film of this sort. Takeshi Kaneshiro was formerly a model in Japan, so his portrayal of action-hero Miyamoto is one of the most affected things ever -- Kaneshiro elevates posing to an art form every time he points his gun. Ann Suzuki makes Milly endearing, even though the character could have easily gone over the edge into annoying, kid-sidekick territory. Finally, Goro Kishitani makes a wonderfully villainous Mizoguchi, and it is worth listening to the Japanese audio track just for his dialogue.

Returner offers Japanese, English, and French languages, along with English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles. The English dub is decent, but the subtitles offer a little bit more. For an action flick filled with gunfire and explosions, there is not a lot of dynamic sound. The picture quality is rather faded, lacking any really vibrant colors. This is a very dark film, so the effect may have been intentional, but it comes across as hazy and dull.

The cover art for Returner is the most colorful part of the presentation. The menus are still shots, increasingly rare these days. There are three featurettes: "Action Coordination," "Art Direction," and "Visual Effects: Before and After." The first two are five-minute interviews with the stunt coordinator and production designer. They're both okay, but other than production designer Anri Johjo's confession that he had no idea how to create the look of the future, the interviews are forgettable.

The mark of a good special effect is not that you can't tell how it was done, but that you can’t tell it was done at all. The visual effects comparison uses a split screen to show off just how much work was done to create the future world -- at the top you get the raw bluescreen footage, and below it the final product. The difference is quite impressive. There is also an hour-long "Production Diary," a collection of home videos from the set. There is an optional commentary with Suzuki and director Takeshi Yamazaki that really helps clarify what's going on, and although it is in Japanese with English subtitles, it is actually pretty funny and full of interesting stories -- the way the best commentaries should be. The disc is rounded out with a few trailers.

With a somewhat predictable plot and some decent special effects, Returner is pure B-movie escapism: entertaining if you are just expecting some mindless fun, but hardly revolutionary.

• Go Back