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. 

Nicky Larson and Cupid's Perfume

Philippe Lacheau's Nicky Larson and Cupid's Perfume has a few metatextual layers to it that makes its creation a little more complicated than a simple adaptation of Tsukasa Hojo's City Hunter manga. Lacheau, the film's co-writer (with Julien Arruti and Pierre Lacheau), director and star is refashioning a specific exposure to an imported property: his childhood glimpse of a re-edited, French language dubbed version of Sunrise's 80s animated series, then rechristened as Nicky Larson. The show ran on French television as part of Club Dorothée, a magazine show that combined variety show skits and music videos with localised anime, such as Dragon Ball, Fist of the North Star, Saint Seiya, and, of course, City Hunter. From a UK perspective, presumably the equivalent would be if someone like Dev Patel was creatively fixated on Channel 4's Late License screenings of the Manga Video library and had cashed in all of his box office goodwill to get a live-action Cyber City Oedo 808 project going. 

That this somewhat applicable situation seems completely impossible is really only further evidence that the British film industry can trend subordinate, mainly offering up studio space or technical proficiency for American money rather than the strange, cultural feedback loops enjoyed by our French cousins. Anyway, Lacheau's film, although spotted with surprisingly fluid acts of violence, foregrounds the more puerile elements of its source material. Women (of all ages) are to be appraised or leered at but, crucially, never actually touched. It's not just Nicky who fails to act on his horndog desires either. Upon meeting the pin-up model of his dreams, played by Pamela Anderson, Julien Arruti's Gilbert - a balding middle-aged man in possession of an eau de toilette that ensnares anyone who sniffs it - has no idea what to do, quickly abandoning himself to whatever handcuffed sex games his beloved has in mind. So, as well as bringing his beloved cartoon serial to the big screen, Lacheau has also preserved the distance between overstimulated, adolescent pangs and the three-dimensional women who exist beyond their coveted image. 

Nicky Larson et le Parfum de Cupidon - 100-TON HAMMER

First look at Philippe Lacheau's live-action City Hunter. As the most visible take on the material (for fans outside Japan and mainland Europe at least), it'll be interesting to see what kind of influence Jackie Chan's 1993 adaptation will have on Lacheau's film. Based on this trailer the director is keying into the star's injury-prone shtick with a hero who isn't quite as accomplished as he thinks he is. There are full blown quotes too (which for all I know could be straight from the Weekly Shonen Jump manga) with Lacheau lifting the dance combat sequence right out of Wong Jing's film.