Mar 162017
 
two reels
deathnote2017

High school student Light Turner (Nat Wolff) finds the Death Note, a book that allows the holder to kill anyone whose name he writes into it, within a set of rules. The book is watched over by the demonic death god Ryuk (voice: Willem Dafoe). After a couple successful uses, he shows the book to Mia (Margaret Qualley), the hot girl at school, who is infatuated by the power. Light chooses not just to kill bad guys, but to make it clear to the world that someone has the power to kill anyone—thus frightening the world into peace. Light’s father is a hard-nosed policeman that ends up hunting for the killer, working with the mysterious L (Lakeith Stanfield).

I’m not a fan of the Japanese film version. It, like the manga that preceded it, has a great idea and begins well. Then it falls apart in never-ending mental gymnastics between Light, who gets progressively less interesting, and L, an annoying character. It goes on way too long focusing on the wrong thing.

This new version makes some substantial changes in Light’s family as well as giving him a girlfriend whose in on it all. The best change was in toning L down. He is autistic in the original, although I wouldn’t say he was played that way. Here he’s just odd. As the story is greatly compressed (the Japanese version was two films, both over two hours), L’s too-brilliant deductions now are random silliness. He just suddenly knows things. The original went on too long; this one’s too abrupt. This version is not a duel between the two smartest people on the planet, but between one teen who just knows stuff and an average if troubled teen. If done properly, that could be an interesting battle, but I kept wanting for either one of them to be cleverer. But what I really wanted was to like one of them. Mia is the only person I wanted to follow, and she’s painted as a little evil.

Things pick up at the end as Light finally uses the power of the Note in interesting ways. I’d have liked to see the entire move run like that. But we still have the problem of neither of the main characters being people I want to spend time with. The Mia movie would have been great. Still, the performances are reasonable, it has a few nice Rube Goldberg moments, and the basic premise is still good. It should have been better, but as this is a Netflix movie, if you already subscribe, it’s worth streaming.

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