‘City Hunter’: Netflix Whiffs Yet Another Live-Action Manga Adaptation
Mainstream animation from the U.S. and Japan may be far apart in sensibility, style, and intended audience, but cartoons from both countries do share one major piece of common ground: the vast difficulty of translating them into live action. Whether softening the artistry of Disney classics for ill-advised blockbuster remakes or attempting to maintain the quirks of a long-running manga adaptation like One Piece for Netflix, there’s an even-when-they-win-they-lose quality to the most notable successes. The would-be franchise-starter City Hunter, Netflix’s latest crack at fleshing out an animated phenom, shares that quixotic feeling, even if it isn’t an awkward Americanization like the streamer's Cowboy Bebop redo.
Technically, City Hunter—like a lot of famous anime properties—originates from a manga, and the source material seems pretty flexible, having inspired multiple anime series, several animated features, a live-action adaptation from Hong Kong starring Jackie Chan, and a live-action TV drama from Korea, among others. But the movie is, in its soul, a cartoon brought to life, for better or worse.
That’s evident from the jump, as its extended pre-credits opening follows private detective Ryo Saeba (Ryohei Suzuki) and his partner Hideyuki Makimur (Masanobu Andô) chasing a young woman through the streets of Tokyo, attempting to save her. Director Yūichi Satō gives this chase sequence a weightless quality even before the woman’s face bulges with alien-looking veins and she leaps away like a superhuman. None of the action is especially convincing, but it is pleasingly breezy, and the cartooniness extends to the trench-coated characters: Hideyuki is positioned as the straight man, while Ryo maintains nearly wolf-whistling levels of libido.