Angel Cop (1989) * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Repugnant, overlong anime that makes it clear how the genre sometimes gets its bad name.
Anime, like any other genre or group, gets an undeservedly bad reputation from its worst members. Aside from the wretched and overrated OVERFIEND, there's other culprits: the insanely dull ODIN, for one. And ANGEL COP, which is just plain vile. What can you say about a story where the title cards are spelled out in splattered blood to the sound of machine-gun fire, and then goes downhill from there?
ANGEL COP is like a bad version of Sylvester Stallone's COBRA fused with a really low-rent rip-off of THE FIRST POWER and some ROBOCOP thrown in for good measure -- which is really saying something, since FIRST POWER and COBRA were wretched to begin with. Any association with ROBOCOP is a slur on that fine movie. The whole thing clocks in at slightly under two and a half hours -- edited together from five half-hour pieces, but while they were doing that, they could certainly have brought the story down to a less painful length.
The plot: An avowedly communist cell named the Red May are trying to destabilize Japan through acts of terrorism. To combat this threat, the police have created a black-bag ops group who work above the law. (Yes, I'm quoting pretty much word-for-word.) Their leader's so macho he doesn't bother wearing a shirt, but this has to be the first anime where I've seen a normal guy who looked like he had more scar tissue than healthy flesh. Oh, I'm sorry -- that's chest hair, combined with particularly bad character animation.
He is assigned a new partner, a female cop named Angel who's probably even more violent and undisciplined than he is. In a scene where the partner's got a gun to her head, she blows away one of the other terrorists in the room, splattering brains and bone all over the wall. In detail. Part of the story ostensibly concerns how Angel goes from an unfeeling bitch to someone with a bit more heart, but the way ANGEL COP plays that point off is by giving her the nerve to ultimately blow her partner's brains out (and all over their enemy). Oh.
Angel is, as are the rest of the characters, mostly nonentities who do what the plot and the screenplay tell them to do -- which is shoot people, blow things up, fall out of windows, and karate-chop people to death. Their enemies are not much better, although they get a few allies who are marginally interesting (before they get killed rather unceremoniously). I wish there was more to leave out, but I'll sum by saying ANGEL COP is a good way not to introduce someone to anime.
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