Joshû shokeinin Maria: Gekijô-ban

Beautiful Noriko Aota, of the Japanese pop group CC girls, stars as a La Femme Nikita type, a prisoner who takes on dirty jobs for the government in exchange for seeing her son occasionally and in the hopes of reducing her life sentence. She will use her body or a gun, whatever it takes to bring down the bad guy. Cool premise, right? - especially if you don't bother to think about the legal implications. Hmph. Don't these film makers know that governments are already snowed under with litigation? Imagine the paperwork if word got out that CONVICTS were being recruited as HIT SQUAD!! The litigation would never end... Anyway, nutty story conceit aside, the obvious question is how good a movie is it? Not very. The plot line, which surrounds a corrupt and power hungry psychiatrist - yeah, I never trusted those guys either - seems familiar and tired and the whole exercise feels forced, and what is worse it feels grim. The bluish monotone of everything, a familiar convention among Japanese films of the 90s to indicate a literally colorless urban landscape devoid of hope and crippling to the imagination, is just dull. The action is not very exciting and there is little suspense. The whole thing lacks for basic entertainment value on just about every level, which begs the question WHAT'S THE POINT? If you're going to wallow around on the fringes of super-villainy, at least get some black humor out of it or something. Noriko doesn't even get topless, despite the obvious come-on of the box art. Why so coy? Did the producers think we wanted a TASTEFUL girl with gun shoot 'em up? Sheesh.