Oh, noitaminA. Your autumn 2013 lineup was looking so good, what with Galilei Donna and this, Samurai Flamenco, two original series with premises that were unique enough to really feel at home on the timeslot… or rather, at home with how it was a few years ago, before it all went to shit. It felt like it could well be a return to form, and a certain level of cautious excitement swept over all of us. The caution was rather justified by Galilei Donna turning out to be utter crap though, but what about Samurai Flamenco?
Samurai Flamenco tells the story of a young model who yearns for more meaning in his life, which he tries to attain through mimicking the hero shows of his youth as a vigilante, and his slightly-older policeman friend in a long-distance relationship who also grew up on the likes of Kamen Rider and Super Sentai but took that inclination towards justice in a more legitimate manner. Together, they fight crime.
Shocking, I know.
Just as a heads up: this review will be spoileriffic as all hell. Due to the nature of the show and the criticisms I have with it, it is impossible to critique it without discussing a lot of plot twists and outcomes.
Samurai Flamenco starts out very, very strong. Goto, the policeman, after work one day bumps into a nude Masayoshi in an alley. Turns out Masayoshi is trying to be a superhero named ‘Samurai Flamenco’ and help clean up the streets, but ended up damaging his costume. Goto kind freaked out a little and, in an act of reflexive self-defence, throws his lit cigarette towards Masayoshi. And ends up setting the rest of his costume on fire.
From there the two get to know each other rather well, sharing very similar interests and a desire to see justice win out against evil, and because Masayoshi is only really tackling extraordinarily petty criminals Goto is not hugely inclined to stop him. After one particular night spent meting out justice on a bunch of middle-school kids through the medium of cheesy speeches and getting the shit kicked out of him, ‘Samurai Flamenco’ ends up becoming a bit of a viral internet sensation, which blossoms into mainstream media attention and a cooperative rivalry with a new female superhero (with a fairly unsympathetic attitude towards men).
If you want to see a show start on the right foot, Samurai Flamenco is definitely a great example. The premise is one you don’t see that often, there’s a great focus on characterisation and development, a fantastic sense of humour is shown by Goto basically being the only sane man in a world surrounded by regular people who take fake-superheroism way too seriously, and there’s a nice bit of discussion on the merits of vigilantism in the face of an organised police force. It’s smart, it’s funny, Goto and Masayoshi have amazing chemistry and are in particular very engaging, it delivers on so much so early on and it’s an amazingly promising start.
For like, 6-and-a-bit episodes. In episode 7, Masayoshi (as Samurai Flamenco) has become rather popular with the public and working with him has done some great work for the police department’s public image. So they take him along to a drug bust, have him pose at the crime scene after everyone’s been subdued, and just make it all a bit of a PR event. But one of the criminals breaks free from his restraints and… Guillotine Gorilla happens.
To say Samurai Flamenco goes off the rails at this point would be putting it mildly. What follows is the ‘King Torture’ arc, where Samurai Flamenco and his allies engage in some actual monsters once a week and fight a bad guy and so on and so forth. I guess you could say it’s a change of tone… not a particularly welcome one, though. Samurai Flamenco started out very grounded, very firmly placed in reality (albeit with more eccentricities), but now it… actually just became a superhero show. But with ~violence~ and ~dark~ undertones. And it’s stupid. Very stupid.
But that wasn’t entirely terrible. It had some interesting thoughts going on, but it wasn’t that well-executed. I was willing to give it another chance, at which point Samurai Flamenco flips me the double birds and just goes fucking insane.
After that arc it becomes full-on Power Rangers with teams and giant robots that combine and fucking magical enemies and shit before we find out that every single superhero that was on TV is an actual superhero irl and then some crazy evil government conspiracy shit happens and Masayoshi becomes a fugitive and the Prime Minister of Japan is a fucking superpowered bad guy who gets his strength through his approval rating but he’s actually not properly evil because he’s doing it to fight an alien that wants to consume humanity and it all culminates in a giant version of Masayoshi fighting an alien on the moon before meeting God and being nominated for president of the world. And fucking EVERYTHING has ‘Flamenco’ in its name because it’s close to ‘flamwenco’ which is a magic word that GRANTS WISHES.
Now this could easily sound like a lot of dumb goofy fun, one of those series that is stupid and zany and illogical and that’s what it was trying to be, and while there was a certain level of self-awareness there was no irony to anything that happened. No lack of sincerity in intent. It was entirely serious in what it was trying to accomplish. And maybe this wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t just terribly written. There’s no logic to the overarching plot, the structuring of it is haphazard and inconsistently paced, and the reason given for why any of it happened was just a complete hand-wave. The entertainment lies entirely in the so-bad-it’s-good-aspect, and even then it’s trying on the audience.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s commenting on the different styles of superheroes, and the logical progression in scale – from individuals to small but elite teams to fucking robots and then defeating aliens in space – but it never does anything with that. They just happen because something different needed to happen and there’s no sense of meaning or purpose beyond that.
It could have potentially been a visual treat, which would have at least made it kind of fun to look at, but that was quickly scuppered when it became clear that the animation would never really exceed ‘complete-in-name-only’ levels.
If have one bit of praise for those troubled middle arcs – and I do only have one – it’s that it generally always succeeds at characterisation. It introduces a lot of characters, gives them relatable and distinct personalities, and keeps up the fantastic chemistry between Masayoshi and Goto (even if he gets completely sidelined after a while). That I really can’t criticise, although it doesn’t even come close to saving the show.
And after all that, when I’m just about to write off the entire show, it has the nerve to close out on a really fucking good arc. It’s back down-to-earth, none of the magical bullshit anymore, just Masayoshi and Goto being good fun to watch together, really delving into the psychology of being a hero when you’re just a normal person. It’s engaging, it’s tense, it ties up what was started in the first episode wonderfully, and it has an utterly heartbreaking element to it. And it’s great fun! The way it chooses to resolve the core conflict of the arc is both heartfelt and hilariously gratuitous (there’s a reason Masayoshi and Goto get shipped so much), and it leaves the best possible impression it could.
Which is just salt in the fucking wound. After all this, after all the incomprehensible and awfully written nonsense, you just come back up and so “lol this show could have been this good all the way through and made good on the promising start”? SUCH bullshit. It really should have just been single-cour – take the first six episodes and last 4, remove the stuff that ties back into the dumbness preceding them, work a few more episodes into the middle and BAM, shit would be fantastic. But nope, instead we got a trainwreck that somehow managed to stop rather cleanly at its final destination.
I mean… it was fun I guess? After a point the nonsense in the middle did reach such a level of absurdity that you couldn’t help but laugh at what they were pulling out of their arses, but regardless of whether it meant to be like that or not it was still bad. And I did end up very eager to watch it each week just to see what nonsense would happen next, so I guess it succeeded at being entertaining. And I never hated it to the point that “I drop it every week!” was a valid sentiment either, unlike Guilty Crown for example. It had generally consistently strong characterisation throughout, and at least 10 of the episodes were pretty good. So it was bad, but I can’t bring myself to feel badly towards it. Just disappointed at the amazing opportunity they wasted.
5/10
[…] didn’t exactly give Samurai Flamenco a glowing review, but that wasn’t because I actively disliked it or anything. It’s because I had no idea what to […]