A young man named Ibuki (played by multi-hyphenate star Raul), styled as a “bad boy” because of, presumably, his dyed-blonde hair and dangling earrings, is recruited by the mysterious head of a Japanese CIA-like organization to protect his high school-aged daughter Honeko (model-turned actress Natsuki Deguchi), who has been targeted for assassination by every criminal organization in the country. She also happens to be Ibuki’s childhood friend. The hitch is that she doesn’t know anything about her real father (she was given up for adoption) and can’t know that she’s being protected or that people are trying to kill her. The other hitch is that every other kid in her class is also a bodyguard trained to protect her.
This is the irresistible starting point Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards, director Junichi Ishikawa’s adaptation of Nigatsu Masamitsu’s manga of the same name, which offers a sturdy structure for serialized storytelling (every new gang attack leading to a new story arc, while the audience gets to know the two dozen or so bodyguards; and the inevitable fitful romance between Ibuki and Honeko sees its inevitable ups and downs — one could easily envision this as a 50-episode anime series) condensed down to two hours. Ishikawa, a 20-year veteran of television (both series and movies) as well as film, does a fine job of capturing the energy of a serial, though he is inevitably limited by the running time. We get to know few of the characters outside the two leads, and even they are reliant on genre code signifiers more than establishing unique personalities. Ibuki’s bad boy image is quickly dispensed with as he realizes he’s in way over his head, both with the other bodyguards (who are all more experienced than him) and Honeko (who really doesn’t have much of a personality beyond being a nice kid who happens to be the Cutest Girl in the World). But the film is bursting with energy, rushing from one story to the next with only a few moments to spare for the heartbreaks and frustrations of teen romance.
Most of Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards‘ fun comes with the discovery of the other bodyguards, all of whom are introduced with comic book-style splash pages announcing their names and specialties. There’s a karate girl, a ninja, a master of disguise, a hacker, a girl who’s really into torturing people, an engineer who pilots a robotic mascot suit — you know, typical high school stereotypes. This cadre is lead by a master strategist, played by Daiken Okudaira, who recently popped up as the surprisingly capable assistant in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud. The interplay between the kids also provides a whole lot of fun, and the high school relationship tropes played more or less straight effectively balance the gleeful anarchy of the film’s fight sequences.
Cinema has delivered a lot of oddball action comedies in the last few years, but few have been able to pull off the the mix found here between fun fights and quirkiness without either compromising the choreography of the action or overplaying the cutesy goofiness until the point of simply being annoying. Your mileage may vary on that kind of thing, of course (there are, for example, some benighted souls out there who find the Baby Assassins insufferable — we must pity them), but Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards finds a breezy middle ground, never as edgy or truly weird as, say, Takashi Miike’s Ace Attorney, but mercifully a whole lot more tolerable than the Kitty the Killers or Gunpowder Milkshakes of the world.
Published as part of Fantasia Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.