Returner
(Columbia/Tri-Star DVD)
(2002)
review by Suspiriorium

Many recent Hollywood films have quite shamelessly been borrowing/ripping off ideas & style from Asian films, injecting them with a little Hollywood sensibility, & then successfully selling it around the world to big profits. The makers of Returner have got wise to this, & decided to get their own back by nicking the plots from numerous American films, injecting a little unique Asian style &, hopefully, selling it on for a profit. Trouble is, with all this exporting/re-exporting, the ideas are now getting a little overripe, & the sense of deja vu that hangs over Returner cannot be dismissed.

The future; a huge war with Alien invaders has killed most of humanity. The few survivors manage to send Miri (Suzuki) back in time to kill the first Alien & prevent the war from happening. She arrives in the middle of a huge fight between lone gunman Miyamoto (Kaneshiro) & gang lord nemesis Mizoguchi (Kishitani). Miri persuades Miyamoto (via a cunning bomb/neck interface) to assist in her fight to prevent the war. Now, wouldn’t it be great if this could also somehow tie in with his own vendetta against Mizoguchi?

Yes, this is all incredibly familiar. Whilst watching Returner, you are inevitably reminded at various times of films like Terminator, Matrix, Blade, ET, Independence Day, the films which inspired them, & many more. You could easily put it into a sub-category of recent action films, including Equilibrium & Underworld, which deliver variations on themes provided by other (better) films, but which are still capable of delivering a solidly entertaining couple of hours. However, I may suggest that Returner is perhaps slightly stronger than those films, as it lacks their fun-sapping efforts at seriousness. Returner is at least only too aware that it’s a derivative & frankly silly B-movie, & is so utterly shameless in it’s borrowings that it’s easy to get caught up in its sense of fun.

The action is all very well handled, & though it’s not nearly up to the standards of a film like Versus for example, there’s still enough slo-mo martial arts, gunplay & explosions to please most action fans. Yamazaki is a relatively inexperienced director, but his way with an action scene is impressively smooth & he delivers some impressive visuals. Indeed, style is so important to Returner, that even with the clock ticking our heros manage to find time to go clothes shopping so that they can look their absolute best whilst spinning around in slo-mo. The performances are rather stronger than you might expect too. Kaneshiro makes for a strong hero, although it’s more about the look than any kind of characterisation, & Suzuki is a tough yet vulnerable heroine. However, Kishitani is the best thing in the film, having an absolute ball as the films main villain.

Ultimately though, Returner is simply too derivative to be entirely successful. Whilst it entertains for an hour & a half, it doesn’t linger in the mind & does very little that you’ve not seen before. I couldn’t really recommend it as a blind purchase, although I’d add it to my collection if the price was right. However, it provides more than enough entertainment to make it a highly worthwhile rental for anyone with a taste for Asian action flicks. Even if its ideas are second-hand, its sheer sense of fun makes it rise above the sum of its parts.

I’ve been watching the DVD from Columbia Tri-Star, which comes with an impressive anamorphic transfer, solid Dolby 5.1 tracks in Japanese & English, & a host of subtitle options. Extras are limited to a couple of trailers, but on the plus side, the Returner trailer is very good indeed.