The Death Note manga has a story so extensive, so twisty-turvy, so dozen-volumey, I wondered how Japan ever could adapt it into a live-action feature film. Answer: It couldn’t. Instead, it had to do it in two: 2006’s Death Note and its immediate sequel, Death Note: The Last Name. Directed by Shusuke Kaneko (one-third of Necronomicon: Book of the Dead and several Gamera films of the ’90s), the first films adheres closely to its source material.
Tatsuya Fujiwara (Battle Royale) plays Light Yagami, a college student who comes across one helluva unique notebook in the rain and takes it home. Clad in black covers emblazoned with the name “Death Note,” its pages are blank. The inside-front-cover instructions explain why: Write someone’s name in the book, and they instantly die. The son of a police detective, Light at first uses this find for good, to rid Japan of its hardened criminals, especially those who’ve slipped through the fingers of Lady Justice. It’s only after he becomes a suspect in this string of serial “murders” that he uses it to save it his own hide.
After the police get nowhere — and lose a lot of their own men in the process — they lean on the candy-addicted, hermit/genius known only as L (Ken’ichi Matsuyama of Detroit Metal City). Thus begins a chess game of wits that also involves a clingy media pop tart, several skeptics and, of course, the so-named shinigami death gods, rendered here through CGI that ranges from fluid to clunky, depending upon the shot.
It’s a crisp, slick slice of crime and fantasy cinema, if a bit too long. The most amazing thing is how much Matsuyama inhabits the L character as originally portrayed on the page by artist Takeshi Obata: his quirks, his stance, his malnourished look, his everything. It’s uncanny. The film marks a killer concept, well-executed — if you’ll pardon the double pun. —Rod Lott