[Kamen Rider Die]

KAMEN RIDER DRIVE: SURPRISE FUTURE



This one… it didn’t really work for me?

I mean, it’s fine on a technical level. The story’s direct. It’s a Shinnosuke-centered narrative. Chase and Go are in it a little bit, as is most of the supporting cast. Kiriko gets some big moments, which I’m generally a fan of. (I’m a fan of Kiriko, full-stop. MAKE. HER. DRIVE.) The action, especially in the finale, is really well done. I don’t love the Type Special suit, but Super Dead Heat is solid, and Type Next is a great futuristic-villain look. The production isn’t offensive in any way, or anything.

But there’s not really a ton for me to grab onto, at least that I want to grab onto.

Like, there’s some fun thematic stuff they hint at in the beginning that I’d’ve been more into. Shinnosuke brings up Krim’s creation of the Roidmudes, and I thought that could be a fun concept to explore alongside Shinnosuke’s future-son: the idea of parenting, of how to feel when something you created doesn’t turn out how you’d hoped. That’s an idea that I’d get a lot out of.

(There’s a bit of a parenting analogue, with Krim and Shinnosuke’s partnership. Shinnosuke regularly brings up how Krim’s views on justice have shaped his own. I don’t know that it’s an all-the-way-through-the-movie thing, in that it’s never really applied to Shinnosuke’s relationship with Eiji, but there’s at least something there on the present-day side.)

But what’s here isn’t so much to my taste. It’s a mix between a superhero plot I can’t buy into, and a supporting cast plot I find pretty tricky to parse.

Let’s hit the superhero part first! I cannot take Eiji’s claims seriously, from the jump. The idea that Krim is some ticking time bomb… no? No, I will never ever believe that? It’s a huge swing for the movie to start off with, and if I’m honest, it never really recovers from it. The post-reveal part of the movie is better than the pre-reveal, but you are asking the audience to believe that Shinnosuke’s Belt Dad is going to subjugate the future and bring the world to ruin. That is a ludicrous ask when the series is already forty episodes deep. If you want to come in with a plot where Krim is reprogrammed, or there’s an evil copy made, fine. But to come in and say Krim Is A Secret Evil Mastermind Who Has Been Lying To You All Along… man, what the hell. There’s no real twist in learning that Drive’s been lied to, because it’s such an unbelievable claim. The only twist is who’s lying, and why.

Which, uh, some new Roidmude! Okay. He’s just a monster to fight, and that’s… I don’t know, whatever. There’s no real grudge, no reason why he’s using Eiji other than to enact his scheme. He doesn’t have some huge beef with Shinnosuke; he just wants to destroy Drive. It’s all fine, nothing memorable or special.

The biggest flaw with the superhero side of the plot - aside from its ridiculous opening gambit - is that Eiji, the real Eiji, never gets to take part in the story. The villain spends the entire movie using his son’s face, but Shinnosuke never gets to spend a scene with his actual son. Eiji only exists as a weapon from the future, so we’re robbed of any catharsis. We never get to see an actual familial connection (beyond a nod to a ghost hologram?), which feels like the least we’re owed by the end of this story.

But that’s the superhero stuff, which is, again, basically fine. Nothing I loved, but competently handled.

Then there’s the whole plot about the police rallying around an officer accused of excessive force, in which a high-ranking police official is heroically guilted into shielding said officer from investigation, which… WOW. Wow. That is… I mean, maybe it played less terribly in 2015? I don’t know! I don’t think it should, but I don’t know! But, boy, in 2022? I do not have a ton of interest in a story that browbeats a cop out of holding other cops responsible for their actions. Accountability is an okay thing for the police to adhere to! Kiriko’s great, but when she’s like HOW DARE YOU QUESTION SHINNOSUKE’S MOTIVES, YOU SHOULD HAVE HIS BACK, I was cringing in my chair. It’s… this whole plot is a real bad look, man. Probably some stuff in there about being more dedicated to ideals than the appearance of ideals, but, no. Absolutely not, to this entire part of the movie.



Also, Kamen Rider Ghost is in this!

It’s been a minute since I watched Ghost, but I’m going to go ahead and say this is basically nothing like how Takeru fights in the show. He doesn’t (if memory serves) come out of portals, or creep around frames, or bob and weave like a skeleton. It looks great here, and I sort of wish it had carried over to the series, but it’s not representative of the show he’d star in. Character’s all weird, too. He sounds real Goth here, which is so hilariously Not Takeru.

Anyway, yeah, this movie mostly wasn’t for me. The whole thing starts off on the wrong foot, and then it never really jumps above Okay for me. One of those movies that’s a decent timewaster – it’s an hour-long tokusatsu story with a bunch of action – but not much more than that to me.