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OK. This is going to be it for my current crazy Japanese movie-thon I'm pretty sure... and it only gets a pass for being a late sequel to something that was pleasantly surprising. Weird thing with Yo-You Girl Cop here though is that it was released in the U.S. by like, a real movie company. So... all these mandatory previews are for relatively mainstream things normal people have heard of. I'm not used to seeing that. It's also just plain weird to see the Magnolia Pictures logo get replaced with Toei's. Anyway, here's some blond girl with a bomb strapped to her chest and her hands twist-tied running down the streets of Tokyo, with security cameras all over. Eventually she gets everyone's attention enough that they clear out, and then explodes. A yo-yo goes flying and opens up to reveal a badge, so... presumably she was a Sukeban Deka for whom things ended Poorly. Then come some James Bondy opening credits, except instead of a bunch of naked girl silhouettes and guns, there's a fully clothed girl silhouette doing yo-yo tricks. Sadly, there isn't swanktacular music.
Now here's some important looking people marching down a green-lit hallway, hauling along some girl in one of those Hannibal Lecter setups. Apparently this here girl was an exchange student studying in New York who kinda went completely berserk and is being deported back to Japan. Oh. She wasn't an exchange student, she was some previous SD's daughter, who had moved to the U.S. and is currently in jail for being a spy. The subtitled American cop lady delivering her and expositing says "The Japanese used to have a word for girls like this. 'Sukeban.'" At which point our main character here freaks the hell out, bursts out of her straight jacket, squeezes through the bars of her cell, steals someone's gun, and makes a break for it. She gets distracted by a little kid though, long enough for the cops to catch up and beat the @#$% out of her. Apparently we're trying to go all grim and gritty here.
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So now she's locked in this big transparent Magneto cell, chained to the roof, and being offered a job as, you know. Yo-yo-wielding James Bond Schoolgirl. If she agrees, they'll pull strings to have her mom not executed for spying on people in America. Weirdly conveniently, they have three days to take care of that, and that same amount of time is also on a timer on this terrorist website called Enola Gay... which apparently is run by a bunch of teenage kids. So they need some teenage kid to infiltrate them, because adults just can't think in a sufficiently angsty problem to solve a case like this. Gee, when you put it THAT way this is just an incredibly stupid premise. Anyway, this whole recruitment bit is pretty drawn out, and plays along the exact same formula as is spoofed so well in Team America that that's seriously all I can think of. Incidentally, she swears an awful lot. Weirdly enough, she thinks the school uniform she has to wear is completely ridiculous, but finds nothing at all wrong with being issued a weaponized yo-yo.
So anyway, she's sent to this school here to be a spy, and is given the same alias as everyone else to ever have this job, because when this series decided to basically be James Bond, they decided to go with the clearly correct interpretation that there's actually a bunch of different spies who all end up using the alias James Bond as their predecessors retire. Also I really hate how grim and gritty this movie is trying to be. It's just annoying. Also at this school we have little Victim Girl here, who does the whole wrist cutting deal, and this Red Jacket Bitch who picks on/tries to murder her. Seriously, there's a line between teasing someone and trying to drop a desk on them from three stories up. Seeing this, SD grabs Victim by the wrist, drags her to see RJB, gets teased for wearing this schoolgirl outfit from the 80's rather than... the actual uniform for this school, and at that point she beats up like a dozen students, and I do believe rips one dude's eye right the heck out of his head. Then she calls RJB out to fight one on one, but she's all "What? Why the heck would I do that?"
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Anyway, Victim suggests that the school's chemistry club is comprised of a bunch of nutcase wannabe suicide bombers. She checks this out, finds two of nerds doing some kind of suicide bomber LARPing, and a chase ensues. Also wow. I'm tempted to switch this over to subtitles because there are SERIOUS VOLUME ISSUES here. Everyone's either shouting at the top of their lungs, or whispering inaudibly. And it's constantly switching between the two. Eventually, the bomber being chased grabs some random girl... oh hey, Victim girl even, to use as a hostage, so out comes the yo-yo. Nobody ever actually trained her how to properly use the thing though, so she throws it totally wild, it ricochets off the wall, hits herself in the temple, and knocks herself out. It all works out though. Suicide bomber nerd is taken into custody and reveals that some contact from Enola Gay helped them build their bombs because apparently he's one of those conveniently nihilistic villains who doesn't need to bother having any sort of actual motivation that are all the rage these days.
Now here's a weird scene with SD riding a bus with only one other passenger, who wordlessly jams the earbuds of his iPod into her ears. We don't even get to hear what it's playing and this scene goes on for a while. Then it's over. Now here's Victim checking out the Enola Gay website and.. hey movie? You want to maybe subtitle this stuff? It's clearly important to the plot. Eventually someone remembers and starts doing so, but seriously, lot of untranslated kana just sitting on screen for about a minute here. To make up for it, here's some people speaking English... OK, this is another reason I should really be watching this subbed. It's kinda weird when all of the sudden someone just starts pronouncing things weird and has Japanese subtitles. Anyway, here's some kinda sting operation where some cop, possibly Spotswood, gets himself killed. Also here's RJB hitting on Romeo. Did I mention this movie sucks? Because this movie sucks. I mean, it's not like there was just a recent example of it sucking or anything, just, there's a bit of a lull here and I thought I should make that clear.
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Anyway, SD winds up chasing after some bad guys just kind of at random, but she totally sucks at everything and is useless so they get away. And OK, that wasn't Spotswood. That's good to know. And here's some more clearly important text we're totally not bothering to translate. I don't think it's asking a lot that you do that movie. Seriously. Your plot is stupid and generic enough that I can cope, but it's just rude. At the moment, we've got this big set to music montage of SD and Victim texting back and forth, and seriously, what little of it is displayed on screen isn't translated. Apparently though Victim is a whiny little emo loser who's going to kill herself now. Oh hey, here's some exposition. So OK, Victim had some internet girlfriend who, it turned out, was actually in her class. They called themselves Romeo and Juliet. So... OK, random evil guy apparently wasn't Romeo, RJB hates lesbians, and Victim's girlfriend decided the best solution to intolerance existing is random suicide bombings... oh actually, she has the perfectly reasonable reaction of yelling at school administrators that it's really #@$%ed up to ignore kids mercilessly beating each other half to death in clear public view. That doesn't work so she blows herself up. So OK, I guess some other person is using the name now. Or she mysteriously survived. I don't really care because THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY STUPID PLOT EITHER WAY.
Feels weirdly like Lain though at this point. This ongoing exposition dump has Romeo and Juliet's pro-lesbian website hacked and replaced with an uncomfortable-for-Americans-named website where people impersonating those two are encouraging mass random suicide bomb protests against uh... whatever. Stupid stupid plot. By the way, for a movie from 2006, this sucker really shows an amazing lack of any sort of understanding at all of how websites work. Or what they are apparently. Also, actual Romeo isn't dead, and actually looks incredibly well for someone who apparently got a face full of explosion. She's just sullen and wheelchair bound.
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You know what? @#$% this movie. Seriously. I can't get over how stupid the plot is, and it has COMPLETELY abandoned any pretense of being at all related to the whole Sukeban Deka thing. I demand weaponized yo-yo action right the @#$% now! All we've got here is another slice of that same generic mass of modern Japanese pop culture where a bunch of whiny kids with no real problem mope about self-destructively, the main character has no real involvement in the vaguely defined, non-plot, and we really just seem to be killing time until an ending where everything is magically solved by someone discovering marginal self-worth. Seriously, what's up with that? Is this the result of a generation of writers growing up on Eva? It is, isn't it. Stupid weird popular show completely destroying decades of awesome weirdness...
Anyway, here's Spotswood reminiscing about the actual, not terrible Sukeban Deka while moping aimlessly. Oh and he's also maybe the main character's secret dad. Because he hid a picture of a baby as she entered. Anyway, now it's time to have a meeting with the main badguy on a roof for no reason. Because this movie doesn't know how to actually set scenes up or have a coherent plot. Because it sucks and is terrible. And nothing interesting ever happens. "Humans are so weak." Wow, what a totally original and natural thing for the villain in something like this to say! Apparently we're at least gearing up for an arbitrary fight scene now. Or, we would be, if the main character weren't a worthless piece of garbage who can't do anything. She gets all in fighty stance and then just gets knocked out.
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Now here's Victim and Badguy talking on the internet, setting up how at the end Victim will save the day by discovering mild self-worth. Just you watch. Oh man I hate this movie so much. This movie and the general shift in Japanese pop culture it so thoroughly embodies. Seriously. This is indicative of a widespread trend. Japan used to produce stuff where people attack missile launching helicopters and cyborgs with weaponized yo-yos. Now we just get girls with no self esteem whining about how they want to kill themselves on the internet. Who the hell is even the target audience for garbage like this? Kids with low self-esteem contemplating suicide? So you can point out that there's a chance of them discovering mild self-worth?
Anyway, the main character gets chained up somewhere with a bomb strapped to her, but manages to not suck long enough to throw it clear. Meanwhile, the bad guys are pressuring Victim to martyr herself for their complete lack of any sort of actual cause. But guess what saves the day? She discovers some mild sense of self-worth! And now here's two random people just kind of out of nowhere with guns so we can almost, almost, have a fight scene, where the main character gets to disarm them with her yo-yo. And here's another bomb strapped to someone, because whenever this movie can't figure out what to do there's a bomb strapped to someone. Which means basically all the time.
And now, totally at random, here's a scene from Point Break. Badguy and a bunch of guns just put on weird masks and went to rob a bank. Just... what? Why? That totally came out of left field and has nothing to do with anything. And then we cut away from it. And now .. what the hell? The main character just went and gor some black leather X-Men movies suit with her regular outfit's neck ribbon thing and is marching off to where the badguys went after robbing a bank because... apparently we're just taking a mulligan? Everything up to the non-sequiteur bank robbery doesn't count and we're starting from scratch? I can get behind that.
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So take two now I guess. Leather clad yo-yo wielding secret agent vs. skimpier studded leather EVIL yo-yo wielding secret agent who has gone rogue (RJB), having a yo-yo duel, in the hideout of some bank robbers. Seriously, this has nothing whatsoever do do with anything that has happened before this point in the movie, and I don't care. Because this is at least halfway interesting, and also, you know, closer to what I thought I was renting tonight. Sadly, it's a pretty boring fight scene, mostly obscured by scaffolding. Also, RJB's yo-yo has blades on it. Because that's how evil works. Eventually though, the main character just realizes, hey! Scaffolding! And pulls it all down on her. Then goes chasing after bank robbers.
Uh-oh. Now it seems this is turning back into that sucky Other Movie again. Here's Victim with a bomb strapped to her again, and Badguy giving a stupid "yeah I don't have any sort of believably motivation" speech again. But oh hey, here's a really really stupid fight scene with a lot of cartoonishness and people falling over railings. That's something. Also here's the main character getting the %@$# kicked out of her by some goon, because she never stopped being totally lame and useless. Then he's killed because some guy comes out of nowhere with a machine gun who fires indiscriminately at them. Now here's Badguy giving another speech. He suddenly removes his wig to reveal that he's secretly... Seifer from FF8! You think I'm kidding don't you. But no, seriously. Suddenly he's got a big white coat and spiky blond hair, and a sword, and this sudden hair revelation makes no sense of any sort within the context of the movie. It's not like earlier there was some blond dude and it's a big deal that they were secretly the same person or anything. He even has a scar across his forehead. Seriously, the badguy just turned out to be Seifer from FF8 for no good reason. Then he blows himself up.
Then the main character calls her mom on her mom's super weird looking phone and they have a conversation I can't make one single word of out because horrible volume problems persist. Apparently she was totally out of the loop on this deported to Japan thing though. But... she can't get her back to the U.S. and apparently doesn't feel like going to Japan herself, because either of those would make it impossible for us to awkwardly wedge in a sequel hook. Which of course we have to do because this movie is terribly written. And, you know, just generally terrible. This was so terrible that I'm not even going to sort it in the archives to be anywhere near Sukeban Deka. If I allowed myself to go back and edit things, I'd replace any references to it from here too. Oh and here's a yo-yo on a black field as the credits roll. Because remember all that crazy yo-yo action that was confined to a single non-sequitur scene? Ugh, so bad.
