City Hunter

In director Yuichi Satoh's City Hunter - Netflix's recent feature-length adaptation of Tsukasa Hojo's Weekly Shonen Jump manga - actor Ryohei Suzuki is given the opportunity to slowly piece together a performance that portrays a delightful kind of elasticity. Suzuki's take on Ryo Saeba is built iteratively. At first we see a cartoon charisma at work, one that has been lifted straight off the cheap, dyed pages of its phonebook-sized source material. Reflective of a strip designed to appeal to teens during Japan's 80s bubble era, City Hunter is, as ever, a man about town. He knows all the hoodlums and hang outs in a Tokyo filled beyond capacity with life and light. When perils are afoot though, Saeba's rubbery ability to respond to incoming danger is, often, played for laughs. 

At one point the slinky private eye places himself, and the inflatable horse costume he finds himself wearing, in the path of tranquiliser darts to protect a dusted-up social media influencer. Suzuki's Ryo is continuously presented as an off-kilter or even absurd proposition then: a handsome forty something with a chiselled body (which he happily shows off) and supernatural combat abilities whose sexual development has stalled somewhere in early adolescence. The deftness with which he snakes around his opponents is not a fluency that he carries over into his personal life either. His apartment is spotted with boutique porn stashes and no woman he meets goes un-ogled. Come City Hunter's finale though, these restless, erratic energies are channelled into gunfights that are more twirling dances than opportunities for grimacing tactical reloads. Saeba's expertise and complete invincibility reminiscent of Bugs Bunny, as he cheerfully detonates the dim-witted goons sent to swarm him.