And Don’t Underestimate

By Fearless Young Orphan : The Last Name (2006) Directed by Shusuke Kaneko

Picking up where Death Note left off, The Last Name concludes the story of the vigilante , armed as he is with a killer notebook. For heaven’s sake don’t watch this unless you’ve also watched Death Note, or you’ll be stupefied, and probably it’s a good idea to have some clue what the anime series or the manga is about too. I’m not rehashing everything came before, because who has time? This is a complicated story.

Into the picture comes little pop-culture celebrity Misa Amane, a young woman who idolizes Light’s vigilante alter-ego Kira because Kira killed the man who had murdered her family. By a rather wild coincidence, Misa has also come into possession of a Death Note of her own. She follows Kira’s example by killing criminals too and, through a series of actions far too complex to explain here, arranges to meet him. Once she discovers that he is a young handsome man, she decides she is in love with him and that fate has brought them together to be the leaders of the new perfect world.

The movie’s Misa is somewhat less annoying than the anime’s Misa, mostly because this is played by a real young woman and is not an anime drawing and therefore does not look like the highly caricatured wet dream of a 12-year-old-boy. What Misa doesn’t realize is that Light Yagami is a sociopathic egomaniac, incapable of feeling things for others. He would gladly kill her off with his own Death Note, except she has a powerful protector in the form of her own Shinigami, Rem, who is sworn to defend the girl. In addition to girl troubles, Light also must cope with the ever-determined detective L, who remains unconvinced that Light is innocent. I feel for L, my favorite character in the series, because he is in fact correct. Light is Kira, and L knows it. But he can’t prove it, not even to himself.

By this point in the show, I was starting to lose my fascination, and of course the movie follows the same course, more or less. In an attempt to put L off their trail for good, Light and Misa must construct an elaborate plan involving giving up their Death Notes, betting on unknown entities, and hoping that everything (including their own memories) falls into place as planned. It sounds more exciting than it actually is, because the execution of the plan involves a tedious interval during which Light and Misa are both under prison surveillance and the investigative team is doing nothing but watching them. It’s a bore.

Once that is over, the plot picks up steam again because at the finish of that elaborate ruse, the Death Note and the Shinigami Rem are both under the control of the investigative team. Now what? If you were watching the anime series, there would be a whole lot still to come, at least eight more episodes though I don’t remember exactly. As for the movie, we’ve got about 35 minutes left. And yes, they are going to wrap the story up.

Now, I’m not going to spoil, but I could. If you have seen the anime series, you might be quite surprised by what is to come in the movie. I sure was. Since the last third of the series was in my opinion a dreadful bore, I was very happy with the way that the Death Note movies chose to end things. I watched both films with the Interfering Antelope, who is a much bigger fan of the series than I, and I expected him to be outraged by the way it turned out. He was not. In fact, he was fine with it, saying that “for a movie, it was a smart way to go.” Now, will all die-hard fans of the series say the same? Yikes, I’m not sure.

Once again you have to contend with a rather stylistic element, but it’s not nearly as noticeable this time around. This second of the two films is not as fun or entertaining, and there’s not nearly as much brainy battling between L and Light. Still, it’s an interesting plot altogether, a better finish than I was expecting, and visually it’s a treat. The movie shortened or completely eliminated a lot of the tedious business from the show, and I can’t complain about that. These are a good couple of films, if you like something weird, thought-provoking, stylish and youthful.