Cromartie High School: The Movie

Well, I'm a big fan of the manga series, so when I found out that there's a live action movie, I had to see it, even it was directed by the guy who did Battlefield Baseball.

We open with a brief history of Cromartie High School, from its creation in 1923 through its many name changes and the entirely unrelated incidents that resulted in the school's destruction on six separate occasions. (This is the funniest part of the movie.) Then, the story begins. Takashi Kamiyama is starting his first year of high school at Cromartie, a school populated entirely by tough gang types. Kamiyama isn't really that type, but he enrolled to prove to his best friend that you can get a good education in even the worst schools. Unfortunately, his friend failed even the incredibly simple entrance exams for Cromartie High, and Kamiyama is on his own. This is a tough school. One of the students is a large gorilla. Either that or a large gorilla just wandered into the school and everybody assumed he was a student. Another student, Mechazawa, is obviously a robot, but nobody has the guts to actually mention that out loud. Then, the disco space monkeys show up.

This is probably even worse than Battlefield Baseball. God damn it. I really wanted to like this one. I mean, it's a Cromartie High School movie. How could they screw that up? Well, kind of like this.

They do get a couple of things right. Some of the best jokes from the comics find their way into the movie. The Mechazawa brothers (Shinichi and Beta) are pretty cool-looking, nice production design there. Even the way that actors in their twenties and thirties are cast as sixteen-year-olds is sort of reasonable as a kind of a take-off on that kind of weird casting, which certainly isn't unheard of in Japanese high school movies. However, the guy who plays Takenouchi is about fifty. That might be taking it a little too far.

The movie's big flaw is that most of the gags really don't work all that well. I mean, I was laughing, mostly because I could remember how funny it all was in the manga, but the jokes just don't come out very well in the movie. Maybe the timing is off or something. They're great gags, but the movie just kind of steps all over them.

And then there are some weird changes in there. I know it's kind of a fan-boy complaint, but why the hell did they cast a Japanese guy as Freddie? The whole joke was supposed to be that he looked like Freddie Mercury, and it was sort of assumed that he never talked because he didn't know Japanese. Well, now not only is the isn't-he-too-old-to-be-in-high-school gag lost (they all look too old for high school), but he's just some weird gay guy who doesn't talk. It doesn't exactly have the same chuckle quality that way.

In a couple of spots, I even started to suspect that maybe the filmmakers didn't really get the point. A big climactic battle with space invaders? Mechazawa has laser weapons? I mean, part of the joke of the manga was that, for all the macho posturing, there were never any real fights. Somebody might get smacked around a little, but only as the punchline of a joke. All the really big confrontations would end in confusion or sleep or somebody getting lost on the way to the fight. If you actually have the big climactic fight, even if it does end in peace and understanding, you kind of lose something there.

The subtitles on this disc are a little funny, too. They're readable and in good English, but some of the translations are kind of weird. For example, when somebody says "Yamamoto-kun" or "Mechazawa-kun," the subtitles say "Yamamoto-san" or "Mechazawa-san." Now, I'm not going to get into the difference between Japanese honorifics, but suffice it to say that replacing "kun" with "san" is kind of pointless. I guess they're sort of dumbing it down for the English-speaking audience, but don't they think that people will at least notice that it's a different sound coming out of somebody's mouth? Or do they just figure that all the foreigners will assume that "kun" is just the Japanese word for "san?" Also, there's a line where they translate the gorilla's name as Whoopi, even though the guy is obviously saying "Gorilla-kun." I don't even know where the hell that came from.

**** out of ten for the script
***** out of ten for the visuals
**** out of ten for the acting
*** out of ten for entertainment value

Average Score- 4 points out of ten
Bottom Line- SOMEWHAT DISAPPOINTING MOVIE