Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006)

Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006)
Aka: Sukeban Deka – Codename: Asamiya Saki; Tokyo Girl Cop
Original Title: スケバン刑事　コードネーム＝麻宮サキ
Translation: Delinquent Girl Detective – Code Name: Asamiya Saki

 

Starring: Aya Matsuura, Rika Ishikawa, Erika Miyoshi, Yui Okada, Yuki Saitô, Hiroyuki Nagato, Shunsuke Kubozuka, Riki Takeuchi
Director: Kenta Fukasaku
Action Director: Makoto Yokoyama

 

The Sukeban Deka franchise is one of those aspects of Japanese pop culture that I’m unfamiliar with, even though the premise of a hot Japanese girl in a sailor suit outfit fighting crime with a yo-yo should be a universal declaration of awesomness. It started off as a manga in the mid-70s, and was followed by a trio of TV series a decade later. About the time that the second TV series was drawing to a close, a feature film, Sukeban Deka the Movie, was produced. Said one member of the Kung Fu Fandom forum:

“I thought it was pretty great. It’s very silly, entertaining, and over-the-top. The exaggerated sound effects, the cheesy music, the fun fight scenes, and the gimmicky characters are all part of this movie’s charm[1].”

 

The following year, a sequel came out, which served as a sequel to the third series. Said the reviewer above:

“I thought this was a very silly and fun sequel. I love how earnest and determined  the main character is, and I love how over-the-top the villains are…[T]he action is fun, the characters are enjoyable, and the tone is so over-the-top. 

Strangely enough, it took 18 years for the third film to come out. I’m guessing that it might have been linked to a one-shot manga released a couple of years before. This film jumps into modern times and presents us with a completely new delinquent to take up the yo-yo in the fight against evil.

The movie proper opens with a CIA agent arriving in Japan with an illegal immigrant in tow. The subject is an adolescent girl (Aya Matsûra) who had been living in NYC on an expired visa. When the police cornered her, she put 11 of them in the hospital, or so we are told. Although she’s now in the custody of Japanese authorities, the CIA agent informs their representative, a slovenly man named Kazutoshi Kira (Riki Takeuchi, of Dead or Alive and Big Man Japan), that the girl’s mother was found to be a former Japanese agent and will now be tried for espionage.

The girl escapes, but is eventually recaptured (albeit not before beating up a bunch of policemen). Kira makes her an offer: if she helps him with an investigation, he’ll have his contacts put in a word for her mother with regards to her trial. The girl eventually relents and takes up the job, assuming the role of “Sukeban Deka” and the false identity of Saki Asamiya, which so happened to be the name of the original Delinquent Girl Detective.

Her mission is to infiltrate a high school. You see, in the first scene, we saw a young lady running in public with an explosive belt strapped to her person. Because her hands were tied, she couldn’t get it off before it exploded. And just because I have to point this out, who the hell forms a crowd around a person decked with explosives? You run for the hills, that’s what you do. In any case, that girl was an agent for the police who was investigating a cult-like website known as Enola Gay that has become popular with some of the more wayward Japanese youth. It functions like an Anarchist’s Cookbook online, albeit one that is not relegated to the Dark Web. The site has recently posted a countdown on its site, which is set to end in three days. The police think that something big is about to go down, and they want Saki to figure out exactly what it is.

Saki enrolls at the high school, where her no-nonsense demeanor immediately earns her the ire of the resident queen bee, Reika Akiyama (Rika Ishikawa, of Shin Cyborg Shibata!!) and entourage of shallow, bootlicking bitches. She does make a friend in Tae (Yui Okada), a suicidal girl who has been the main target for Reika’s bullying. I mean, when we meet her, she’s being interrupted in slashing her wrists with a box cutter by Reika’s friends drenching her in dirty mop water. How much more troubled can you get? Saki learns from Tae that the female agent had been meeting with the chemistry club before she died.

A visit to the chemistry club reveals that its two members are not only manufacturing explosives, but are making explosive belts with them. Where the hell is the adult supervision here? Saki rescues one of them, who has fled into a shopping mall, while the other one is saved by a mysterious man posing as the school’s janitor. When the latter disappears, Saki tries to save the former from a kidnapping shortly after his release from police custody. She fails to help the kid, who is taken by the creators of Enola Gay. The mysterious man is Jiro Kimura (TV actor Shunsuke Kubozoka), and, judging from his gang of well-armed henchmen, it’s obvious that the man has anarchy in the making.

Will Saki be able to stop Jiro before his planned mass suicide event? What is his connection to Tae? And just what are Jiro’s aims in teaching explosives manufacturing to his hundreds of followers?

Yo-Yo Girl Cop is one of those movies that sounds more interesting than it actually is. There is a lot of plot, or at least a lot of exposition. The movie stops dead for almost ten minutes at one point so Saki and Tae can have a text message conversation about the latter’s best friend and the website they created to be a Safe Space for loners and outcasts. It does tie into the plot, but it really does kill the forward momentum of the film. There is also a connection between Saki and the lame-legged slob Kira, but that is implied more than explored. Aya Matsuura makes a good protagonist, but she needed a better script for her hard-ass character.

The biggest crime this movie commits is that it dedicates the opening scenes with Saki to establishing her as a complete bad ass, from the Colonel Trautman-esque description of her putting cops in the hospital to subsequent escape attempt, but then proceeds to make her largely ineffective in the subsequent action sequences. Message to filmmakers: Don’t introduce your character performing wire-assisted martial arts and stuff, only for her to get knocked out by her own weapon in the next action sequence. That is both disappointing, inconsistent, and stupid.

Action duties are given to Makoto Yokoyama, a veteran action director of tokusatsu like “Garo” and “Seiju Sentai Gingaman” (aka Power Rangers Lost Galaxy). Yokoyama has also recently worked on more prestigious fare in recent years, including the Tokyo Ghoul movies and The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill, which has gotten a lot of praise for its modern, high-octane, Hollywood blockbuster type of action. Yokoyama’s gets very little opportunity to show off his choreography skills in Yo-Yo Girl Cop. After a short fight with the police and a brief scuffle with some would-be bullies at school, the action is muted until the climax.

The climax sounds TOTALLY AWESOME  on paper: Saki Asamiya suits up in a bullet-proof sailor suit that was apparently designed by Bruce Wayne and storms the bad guys’ hideout. There she gets into a yo-yo fight with Reika, now wearing a black leather punk slut dress. While the yo-yo action is largely CGI, it has a nice comic book aspect to it. And let’s be honest, after 75 minutes of film, I’m just glad something is happening. She then takes on the other bad guys, who are all armed with automatic weapons. This part of the climax is, well, surprisingly easy considering a) how ineffective Saki has been up until now and b) the fact that six guys are so are raining automatic fire on her from above. You mean to tell me that not a single bullet came close to her head? Tak Sakaguchi (Versus and Death Trance) shows up as one of the henchmen and throws a few spin kicks, but is dispatched with little fanfare. We then get a short, unremarkable yo-yo vs. katana battle. How do you make that forgettable? Low budgets, I assume.

In the end, this film needed more yo-yos.

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[1] - https://www.36styles.com/kungfufandom/topic/14128-japanese-movie-mini-reviews/?do=findComment&comment=297334&_rid=6401


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