[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DEN-O & KAMEN RIDER KIVA: CLIMAX DEKA



Okay, here's what I liked about this movie:

-Hana was the MVP of this entire ridiculous enterprise. From the intro sequence, where she used a rocket launcher on fleeing monsters, to the finale where she foretold one of Kenny Omega's greatest matches by single-handedly demolishing a group of henchpeople, Hana was fantastic. Seeing that little girl act as the muscle in a group of imagination monsters from the end of time was always a highlight from the Den-O series, and they absolutely found a new level to that gag in this film. Her in that cute but severe uniform! Adorable.

-The production designer clearly had a blast, judging from the insane background details and jokes. There's a point where Urataros is in the bullpen, and he's reading a magazine called Men's Ura with a picture on the cover of him possessing Ryotaro. That gag alone forgives a huge number of this movie's sins, and there're plenty more like it. For a movie that steadfastly refused to take its cop homage seriously, the DenLiner Police were perfectly built to take the piss.

-Negataros says "All of you will merely be the opening performance” as he's about to Henshin, which is a perfect inversion "Right from the start, I'm at a climax!” That is one of the smartest lines in this movie.

-Deneb apologizing to a monster (that he's about to detonate!) for deceiving it in the course of an undercover operation was... DENEB! So great, unfailingly. He doesn't get a ton to do, but that joke and the little epilogue thing where he embarrasses Yuuto are pretty great.

-It was very considerate of them to put Kiva's name in the title.

That's about it? Everything else was... not to my tastes.

If you had told me that Kobayashi was contractually obligated to deliver this film to Toei, and her hope was that she could make it so off-putting and borderline grotesque that she'd never be forced to make another Den-O project again, I would absolutely believe you. Everything about this film feels ill-advised and coerced. I think I liked the Den-O crew less at the end of this pseudo victory lap?

It's seriously hard to put into words why this movie rubbed me the wrong way. It's like... it's like it was easier to list the few things I actually enjoyed, and then gesture at the rest of the movie and go Not That. I didn't like how it used Ryotaro. I didn't like how it used Kiva's cast and themes. I didn't like how it took a poignant and heartfelt Den-O finale and then chucked it in the bin to do a big dumb cop parody. I didn't like how even the tenuous rules of Den-O seemed to be suspended for the sake of breezy comedy. I didn't like the villains, any of them, all of them. I didn't like Suzuki, the character this entire story was about. I just top-to-bottom did not enjoy the story being told.

Suzuki would've been a halfway interesting side character, but he probably should've gotten top billing. It's his story. He's the lead character, by far. He's the only one with anything approaching an arc. If I had never watched any other tokusatsu, and you showed me this movie and asked me to guess which two characters had TV shows, I would've said definitely Suzuki and probably Ryotaro. Suzuki is the one on whose shoulders this entire story rests.

It's just, he's lame? His story is just Wataru's in miniature. He wants to make the memory of his father proud, just like Wataru; and he's so anxious to do it that he's failing at it, just like Wataru. But where Kiva expands that idea out into generational obligation and the negative consequences of looking for approval, this movie's just like He Needs One Win. It doesn't really interrogate the idea so much as take it as a given, treating the nearly-fatal blunders of a man trying to achieve at the level of his dead father as, like, youthful exuberance. It's taking a nuanced and complicated narrative and flattening it into an obvious problem with a simple solution.

And with the entire film given over to that thin version of Kiva, it leaves little to no space for a story about Ryotaro. There's some fan-servicey things (it's nice to see Airi give that lunch to Ryuta, for sure), but there's no reason for more Den-O beyond We Heard You Want More Den-O. The story of Ryotaro and his friends doesn't grow or evolve. Ryotaro isn't invested in this story in any extra way. He wants to help people and prevent Imagins from taking over the world (or whatever the hell Negataros is up to), but if you condensed this thing down to a third the runtime, it'd've been a funny but slight episode in the early 20s of the original episodic run, or maybe the late teens. Nothing special, narratively. Nothing that really broadens Ryotaro's character or really digs into the show's themes. A cute adventure, nothing more.

But it is not a third the runtime, it's over an hour, and there's a shocking amount of nothing to the plot. All of the setup for the cop stuff happens offscreen, as does everything related to Negataros. It's no backstory and no character. Negataros's scheme is vague to the point of self-parody (he recruits people by saying Hey Do You Want To Join An Evil Organization), but he's missing the very specific flavor Kai gave the same schtick. Which, Negataros's shtick is one hundred percent Kai's schtick. The next villain the Den-O crew faces after defeating Kai is just palette-swapped Momo doing Kai's dialogue! It's uninspired.

The whole movie is sort of uninspired. It's just one joke, Den-O But Cops, stretched to the length of a film. I dug it as a series of Wizard Net-Movies, but over an hour of it? Yikes. No thanks! It runs out of steam incredibly fast, which is probably why this sixty-five minute movie has a twenty-minute fight scene at the end. There's just nothing it's trying to say, and then there're no other ways to say it?

This movie... ugh. Not to my tastes.