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Cowboy Bebop (2021)
Love Letter? More like Break-up Text
I wanted to like this. I really did. I had my reservations about it being made by Netflix, we all did! The race change of Jet Black, a tone deaf reaction from the lead actress to fan dislike of desexualised costumes - but the allure of a classic anime and all it entails was too strong to resist... I was hardly shocked to discover that my fears were justified as the story, characters, direction, cinematography and choreography all belied its score.
John Cho appeared to do his best as main character Spike, with a slight air of likeability, effort put into his aging body and some decent laughs with his shipmate Jet. What's missing is the care-free attitude that comes with being a youthful man as well as a seriousness. Instead, Cho is a blah - a nothing role, playing third fiddle among the crew of the Bebop. Mustafa Shakir proves to be best thing about CB. He proved his casting a decent choice with a true-to-the-original performance, nailing the voice and even doing well with a rewrite of his character to include a past. That is where the positives end.
Daniella Pineda's casting as femme fatale Faye Valentine was stupid at best and deliberately antagonistic at worst. Instead of a confident woman who flaunted her bits to gain advantage over idiotic men, we get a frumpy, short 'little sister' who swears every opportunity and bats for the same team. With fights that didn't always go her way and an exclamation of "BALLS!" she was not totally without sympathy or laughs. Whereas the rest of the cast could be fresh off the streets of L. A. Gren is no longer a smooth saxophonist but a gender-neutral hipster. Julia is now a singer with one song under her belt but acts fresh out of college with a face full of Botox. New characters are given dire dialogue with explicit language for the sole purpose of appearing edgy. Antagonist Vicious is the exact opposite of his animated counterpart and it's just plain dumb.
Unnecessarily jaunty camera angles adorn each shoddily lit scene with overuse of teal and orange colour toning. Yoko Kanno's glorious musical score is used and abused to festoon any scene with zero thought to tone or ambiance. CGI is steady but set-design drab. Even with all this baggage, the real killers are the writing and direction. Changes to the script are often essential in reboots, but major ones that push social agendas (in particular, ones that are so lacking in subtlety) make a mockery of the original source. The less said about the ending, the better. The whole thing reeks of desperation to please an increasingly vocal minority.
Thank God the original exists, and praise him again for cancelling this awful holly-weird monstrosity.