[Switchblade]

I really didn't care for this movie the first time I watched it, which felt weird because it was the first piece of W media that really didn't click with me. I think a lot of it was that I was excited to see Shotaro, Philip, and Terui back in action again after almost a year of OOO and what we got instead was this. Team W ends up taking a backseat to Skull and, frankly, I don't care enough about Skull/Sokichi to feel like I needed or even wanted a fully detailed origin story for him. It really wasn't what I wanted and was only the better part of the movie for me because it felt like the writer had actually seen the show they were writing a movie for which is definitely not the vibes I got from the OOO part (but that's a conversation for next year).

This time around I liked it more, but I still don't love it. I think a lot of that is just lowered expectations; knowing this was a Skull feature meant that I was able to just accept it for what it was. And what it was was fine. Sokichi is definitely a character that has a lot of style and it was very much on display here. The story was reasonably entertaining as a hard-boiled detective story, questionable reuse of Akiko's actress notwithstanding. The action scenes were pretty decent. Shroud's wig was even more laughable than normal. It's still probably my least favorite piece of W media, but I have an Eternal movie left to go through before I can make that call.