Review: The Chasing World

Yusuke Yamada’s best-selling novel, “Real Onigokko”, was set in the year 3000 and centered around an arrogant king who dealt with overpopulation by coming up with a sadistic game in which everyone with the surname “Sato” would be chased down and murdered for sport. Director Issei Shibata only had about 100 million yen (~$1 million USD) to film his live-action adaptation (English title: The Chasing World), pretty much ruling out any shot of setting it in the year 3000. Instead, he based his version in an alternate version of modern-day Japan. He probably could have stopped there, but he also felt the need to give the film’s main character the “special power” of shifting back and forth between the normal world and the alternate world where the chasing game exists. Unnecessary? Probably. Convoluted? Hell yes. But the basic elements of the original story are kept mostly intact, and those are still pretty damn cool.

Our protagonist is Tsubasa Sato (Takuya Ishida), the leader of a trio of trouble-makers that tend to piss off the local thugs led by yakuza errand boy Hiroshi Sato (Shunsuke Daito). And in the interest of foreshadowing, we find out pretty quickly that Tsubasa has a unique, completely unnatural talent for evading pursuers; doing backflips and running up walls is not uncommon.

Tsubasa’s family life is not quite as spectacular, however. Since his mother’s mysterious disappearance, his father has become a drunk and his sister Ai (Mitsuki Tanimura) has been in a psychiatric ward because she refuses to speak or even respond to anything around her—a helpless state her perverted doctor (Akira Emoto) repeatedly takes advantage of when nobody is around. However, Tsubasa still holds out hope that his mother may still be alive and their family will have a chance to be normal again.

After being accosted by Hiroshi’s gang once again in the park, Tsubasa suddenly finds himself teleported to a parallel world. The park itself seems the same at first, but everything else has changed. His two best friends are now gay lovers, Hiroshi is no longer a thug, and there’s a gigantic imperial tower in the middle of the city where the malevolent king rules. Oh, and there are creepy masked maniacs all over the place slicing anyone with the surname “Sato” into pieces with razor wire.

Being Satos themselves, Hiroshi and Tsubasa escape together and run until the game time limit ends for that day. They’re later approached by a girl who appears to be Tsubasa’s sister Ai, but in this reality she’s perfectly normal. She then proceeds to go into an extended explanation of parallel worlds that succeeds only in grinding the movie to a screeching halt before the chase mercifully starts up again. More tedious exposition follows—along with a few pretty silly revelations that deviate even further from the novel—before an ending that’s so ridiculous I’m still not quite sure if it was meant to be serious or kitschy.

“The Chasing World” could probably be described as a cross between Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale and an episode of Doctor Who, but done with the budget of the latter. All things considered, it’s a generally enjoyable flick with a few glaring weaknesses that you can either choose to dwell on or ignore. The confusion added by including parallel worlds did tend to make the storyline a bit murky at times, and the cheese quotient is pretty high (do we really need an emotional flashback montage to mourn a character who was just introduced 10 minutes earlier?) but the things that made the original novel a success (the game, the relentless masked guys, the oppressive dictatorship, etc.) still work well. The three young main cast members did a solid job, and we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of each of them down the line. In a few short years, Mitsuki Tanimura in particular has established herself as one to watch—although I’m starting to get a bit creeped out that so many of her roles involve being tied up or shackled (in this case, both).

It won’t win any awards or change any lives, but if you’re in the market for a fast-paced thriller with a sci-fi twist, you could do a lot worse than this flawed little gem.

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