天下制覇

   

Don’t worry. It’s just multiple drills.

Impressions:

It’s in the same style as the Fujiko TV series style, but unfortunately, took a lot more to heart from it than just the look and noodly CGI people. You’d think a Lupin flick (although it’s structured as two episodes) would remember to have a little fun. Lupin traditionally gets away with a lot of handwaving in the name of amusement and adventure, but that actually requires amusement and adventure, things that this kind of forgot about in the name of continuing to feign being dark or whathaveyou by ‘killing’ Jigen and having Fujiko be nearly raped to death to the amusement of crazy people in golden masks. No, I’m not exaggerating. She is naked in an aquarium, filled with oil, flopping and flailing while a twenty foot robot dressed like a gimp unzips its pants and spends a few minutes trying to shove a penis made of drills into her.  

There’s also not really anything going on except “assassin wants to kill Jigen” to bookend about 15 minutes of Fujiko flouncing around. Even his gimmick is lame. “Orders headstones of his victims.” Yeah, not that menacing, Buffalo Bill. You’d also think a professional super assassin would be able to tell the difference between a squib and an actual head-shot. They tend to be… messier for one. At least one person on the staff should ask “Does this make sense?” or “Do we need this?” when they’re overexplaining the mystery of how Lupin got a police uniform, or showing how badass the assassin is by him pulling an entire sniper rifle and rounds to spare out of a hidden compartment of a thin briefcase, but maybe all those people on staff gave up after someone declared that they had to have a scene where a naked Fujiko has to oil wrestle a giant mechanical gimp with a drill for a dick. Seriously. There is no way to spin that. A giant robot gimp tries to rape Fujiko with a multi-drilled penis. Those entire ten minutes could have easily been completely cut and nothing whatsoever would have been any different. 

There are numerous issues, I suppose is the takeaway point here, especially in consistency and writing. I say this about a series where we accept without question that a character’s pockets are extradimensional. The second half especially was nearly fifteen straight minutes of exposition and “all according to plan.” A plan that, if we cut out the part with robot murder rapists, took almost longer to explain than it did to actually watch. At least they explained it afterward instead of before. Still, sitting around listening to Lupin drone on for nearly a third of the special’s run time is hardly my idea of exciting funtimes adventure. Then again, I’m not that into gimp robot snuff films either, so maybe I’m not the target audience.