ケイゾク(Keizoku - 1999)
This is a Japanese series, which work more like British series than American ones. That is, they tell a few episodes and then that's it, the story is done. If it's really popular, maybe they get a sequel series or a movie. This is a really fascinating one for me because it's such an uneven journey with wildly clashing tones.
The first
Keizoku ("unsolved cases") series was an unabashed
X-Files ripoff. A Tokyo Metropolitan Police officer screws up on the job and is banished to the keizoku department, where careers go to die. Viewers follow the bright new female recruit who requests assignment to the department to make a name for herself by solving these dead cases. While they all seem bizarre and unexplainable, she proves that each one can be solved with good procedural detective work. It was a modest hit.
ケイゾク(Keizoku) 2: SPEC (2010)
This much-delayed sequel series is where this really takes off as somewhat of a remake but also upending expectations. This time, we are introduced through SIT officer (like SWAT) Sebumi, whose own unexplainable screwup leads him to be banished to Keizoku. When he arrives, the sole investigator in the department is a young girl, Toma, who has no social graces and has her arm perpetually wrapped in a sling. Sebumi's re-assignment starts a sudden uptick in new "unsolvable" cases, which Toma is happy to believe are the result paranormal abilities. Sebumi is the sceptic, who insists that muscle and streetwork solve cases over hypothetical deductions. The odd couple interplay is the heart of the series, seeing it through sort of "villain of the week" episodes where Saya basically discovers a new X-man each episode.
I caught this in fits and spurts on TV in Japan, and struggled to understand wtf was going on. The setup is obvious enough, but the names for different abilities (like precognition) are hard to understand, as is all the political and conspiracy theory talk. As the disparate threads introduced each week began to cohere into a complicated story with Hellfire Club-type mutant illuminati councils, I lost the ability to follow the plot. It took me years, but I finally tracked this down with subs.....and it's
still not fully explained. A street fortune teller who can really tell fortunes is one thing, but by the end when unspeaking men in suits show up to blow vuvuzelas that teleport people, I was both totally lost and totally hooked.
This is a fascinating watch for anyone looking to get into popular Japanese cinema (not the auteurs) or anime though. The tone, running gags, and use of cultural tropes is like a live action anime. There are some fantastic stylistic elements to it, such as the credit sequences, music, and Toma's Sherlockian crime-solving method. At the end of each case, she uses ink and paper to paint the characters for all the key elements in the mystery. Then she rips them to pieces and scatters them in the air, moving through a cloud of the word bits in slow motion, picking out what's missing to solve the mystery. While the acting can be overly slapstick at times, Erika Toda is a great anchor for the series, and wanting to find out the mystery of her arm kept me watching to the end. While it is somewhat resolved, this teases a sequel film in a post-credit sequence just like later MCU movies. (They did eventually make several, which I'll have to watch to get all the answers!)