The movie cuts to a press conference in Japan. Young author Aki Akahori (Ayako Fujitani) is being feted on the occasion of her latest novel, which she tells her publicist will be the last featuring her popular creation, the seemingly Columbo-esque avuncular detective “Inspector Takabe.” Freaked out by too much attention, and possibly something else, Aki hightails it to…San Francisco. Without telling anyone. An impromptu meeting with some old friends gives her a chance to show off some chops-in-deduction, traits the viewer is meant to believe she imbues her fictional creation with. But Aki’s not as cocky as all that. Toying with a straight razor in her hotel room bathtub, she’s clearly in distress. Maybe the charming stranger who approaches her in the hotel bar, also Japanese, can provide some distraction if not salvation.
For a while the two narratives, that of Sheriff Del Moral and Aki, run on alternating parallel tracks. Co-writer/director Dave Boyle actually keeps the viewer guessing with respect to timelines; as various (unseen) Asian men keep turning up in different states of distressed being, and Aki meets various other harried Japanese males, one is apt to wonder if the movie’s playing some sort of staggered-time game. As it happens, it’s not. Once Del Moral and Aki find each other the plot both deepens and thickens. Serna, with a good-humored gravitas that brings to mind Jason Robards, Jr., and Fujitani, whose combination of vulnerability and sharpness is spectacularly appealing, make a really intriguing team of investigators.
And that’s part of the problem with the film, at least for me.
And here I must pause, and ponder the ethics of the spoiler alert. This should serve as a signal for any reader with a powerful interest in watching the movie to stop reading now.
Still reading? Okay. Well, I’m not going to give anything away, at least not directly. Instead, I shall comment on the general topic of Genre Convention and what I consider acceptable ways of Breaking Genre Convention. Any of you folks out there remember a 2008 Korean movie called “The Chaser?” Really brutal, engrossing, race-against-time thriller that broke genre convention in a lot of ways, not least of which was making its titular protagonist the most unappealing character you could ever not-want-to-but-nonetheless-be-compelled-to-root-for in a movie ever. Which was kind of exhilarating. But then…Well, sometimes a movie oversteps its boundaries in an attempt to be “different,” and sometimes that overstepping is a grave miscalculation.
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