Lupin the IIIrd: Jigen Daisuke no Bohyô

The TV series A Woman Called Fujiko Mine was a darker, sexier take on Lupin III. It was also a work of art that kept viewers off balance and built something extraordinary.

This hour-long video was billed as a continuation of this incarnation of the Lupin III franchise. It's entertaining nonsense about Lupin and Jigen facing an impossibly skilled assassin, but it's also somewhat of a betrayal of the Fujiko series, in that the strong, smart, capable woman has now been reduced to a naked damsel in distress. (Not only that, the rape-ish scene that is her main appearance makes absolutely no sense in the wider context of the video.)

Fujiko's role here seems like a slap in the face of the series, as though the men who took over from the woman-created Fujiko series wanted to slap Fujiko back into her role as sexy-generic-woman.

They did better in the next entry and better still in the third, which put the focus back on Fujiko, but this one, while entertaining and with some good sequences, is about as much a sequel to A Woman Called Fujiko Mine as if you made a sequel to Citizen Kane that was characters in the film doing a "weekend at Bernie's" with Charles Foster Kane's corpse.