Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Somehow a new year is upon us, and I hope you’re all doing your best to reckon with that fact in whichever way renders it least existentially terrifying. Personally, I’ve been far too busy to stand aghast at the march of time – the last week has seen me racing to catch up on all the past year’s finest productions, and hopefully pull together a quasi-timely Year in Review. But don’t worry about that diminishing your usual Week in Review spoils; I’m sitting on a healthy buffer of film reflections at the moment, and have hand-picked a group of reflections that range from the conclusion of our Naruto filmography project to Ted Raimi getting his face caved in. Let’s ring in the year’s first Week in Review!
First up, our journey through the Naruto filmography continued with Naruto Shippuden: Road to Ninja. Road to Ninja is one of the most unusual films in the Naruto canon, one of the most unbalanced, and also one of the best. The film’s conceit draws on the reality-shifting powers introduced in late Shippuden in order to toss Naruto and Sakura into an alternate reality, one where Sakura’s parents were the heroes who sacrificed themselves for the village, while Naruto’s parents are alive and well. Alongside this shift, basically all of the villagers’ personalities have been altered or flipped in some way, resulting in new constructions ranging from “Shikamaru the idiot” to “Kiba the catboy.”
The film is technically building off a one-off conceit that was already introduced in Shippuden, but while the Shippuden episode mostly uses this idea to riff on the altered young ninjas, Road to Ninja has quite different priorities. In spite of Naruto’s initial resistance to this new reality, he eventually gets seduced by the prospect of a genuinely loving family, and embraces the joys of time spent with his would-be parents. What follows is some of the most poignant and intimately observed character drama in all of Naruto, with both Naruto and Sakura reassessing their own identities, and coming to a better understanding of each other in the process.
This film’s expression of Naruto coming to peace with his parents’ choices was so sharp and convincing it actually made me wish this beat came from the mainline production. That said, the film also has some serious weaknesses: the time spent with the other alternate-universe ninjas is mostly a predictable bore, and the final villain is both unsatisfying and a clear break of this world’s own established logic. Still, I’ll take the clumsiness if it’s standing alongside material as good as this film’s middle stretch, which stands as some of the best character work either Naruto or Sakura have ever received.
We then finished up the Naruto catalog with The Last: Naruto the Movie, which attempts to bridge the gap between the end of Naruto and beginning of Boruto by relaying the romance of Naruto and Hinata. This is admittedly an uphill battle; Naruto basically never spared Hinata a second glance throughout the series, meaning the entirety of their “fabled history” is composed of that one time Naruto stopped Hinata from being bullied, that one time she looked at him in ninja academy, and that one time she fought for him during the Pain saga.
It’s a thin recipe for a legendary romance, but that just leaves all the more room for Hinata to be her usual shrinking violet self, as she graduates from anxious gift-giving to actually making small talk with her beloved Naruto. Sakura also overperforms here, gleefully embracing the role of Hinata’s confidant in all romantic matters. Couple that with the film’s evocative use of dreams and montage to draw throughlines out of the cast’s memories, and you end up with a film that’s at the very least a triumph for Hinata herself, if not a convincing sell of Hinata and Naruto as a couple.
We then checked out an adaptation of another Clive Barker story, The Midnight Meat Train. In its prose form, this story is austere, alienating, and brief; a delicately illustrated collection of subway encounters, building up to an otherworldly and emphatically adaptation-unfriendly conclusion. It frankly seems like an awkward choice for turning into a film, but director Ryuhei Kitamura ably captures the source’s key variables: the grubby shadows of New York streets, the silver-streaked anonymity of late night subways, and that imposing suited figure, seemingly nonexistent just moments ago, now marching ominously down your subway car.
The film has to stretch the original material somewhat thin to fill up an entire film’s runtime, and the conclusion still doesn’t really work outside of the confines of prose, but The Midnight Meat Train is an otherwise commendable adaptation of Barker’s short story. Vinnie Jones is such a perfect fit for the film’s central butcher that I retrospectively couldn’t imagine anyone else handling the role, while Bradley Cooper lends A-lister respectability to the film’s ambiguous first act, as if to assure audiences that this film won’t really go all the way into B-movie bloodshed. That promise is swiftly broken by a hammer to Ted Raimi’s head (always good to see you, Ted), and if Kitamura isn’t exactly the best at creating a sense of slowly building dread, he makes up for that with the action choreography chops demonstrated in the film’s last act. Overall, The Midnight Meat Train is somewhat uneven, but possesses more than enough strengths to earn a recommendation, particularly if you’re a Barker fan.
Next up was Bubble, a recent anime film about a near-future world wherein Tokyo has fallen beneath the veil of a massive glimmering bubble, within which orphaned teens compete in high-stakes parkour battles. Though the film is written by Gen Urobuchi, the script is so minimal that you can’t really feel his hand; it’s pretty much a played-straight retelling of The Little Mermaid, with a bit of a teen competition angle grafted on for flavor. Far more obvious is Tetsuro Araki’s presence as director; Bubble’s fundamental reason for existence is its Attack on Titan-reminiscent parkour sequences, wherein cameras swoop around characters as they float like butterflies across the rooftops and rubble of Tokyo.
Bubble’s worldbuilding is overcomplicated and its love story undercooked, but every one of those racing sequences makes complaints about such feel somewhat misguided. The film only ever wants to be a visual experience, and between the dazzling race sequences, pearlescent backgrounds, and Wit Studio’s increasingly reliable makeup department, it certainly achieves that. Don’t expect to be surprised, and you’ll likely have a fine time.
Our last viewing was The Invitation, starring Nathalie Emmanuel (probably best known as Missandei in Game of Thrones) as a young American woman who discovers she’s actually related to a long-lived English family, and is promptly whisked away to attend a family wedding. Arriving at a posh castle in England, she soon learns her new family possesses some very old and dangerous secrets.
I really wanted to like The Invitation; it fits neatly into that fun “eat the rich” horror subgenre exemplified by films like Ready or Not and You’re Next, and Emmanuel is an excellent actress. Unfortunately, she is here let down a narrative that spends far, far, far too long ruminating on “what sinister thing is happening here” mystery, and far too little time enjoying the fruits of that mystery revealed. Emmanuel’s character sails blithely past a dozen or so red flags during her time in England, resulting in an audience experience that’s less “deliciously painful dramatic irony” and more “yelling at the characters to stop doing such stupid shit.” All that, and it doesn’t even succeed as horror, offering nothing more chilling than various bumps in the night. An unfortunately easy skip.
