Arch Angels (Warau Michael) review

Director Issei Oda has spent the better part of his career coming up with bizarre special effects on a shoestring budget for films such as Uzumaki and Long Dream. So when the decision was made to film a movie adaptation of Izumi Kawahara’s manga “Warau Mikaeru”, he was a logical choice to be in charge. St. Michael’s Academy is a pretty whimsical place where 100% reality is never an option. Thus, Arch Angels is appropriately chock full of CGI and various camera tricks to bring that unique fantasy world to life. The most obvious pitfall in a project like this with an inexperienced director is that the actors might get upstaged by the attention-grabbing scenery. The solution? Hire a cast of actors with attention-grabbing personalities. Juri Ueno was the perfect choice to play Fumio, having an eclectic enough personality to be believable as a straight-A-student, star athlete, and former newspaper delivery girl. Like Swing Girls, Arch Angels has a large cast of characters and you really need someone to be the undisputed center of attention for it to work. Ueno is once again up to the task.

St. Michael’s Academy is a prestigious catholic girls’ high school located on an island in the middle of the Azure Sea. Legend has it that St. Michael himself once descended from the heavens to protect a group of maidens that fled to a church while being attacked by a giant dragon. After that faith-instilling event they decided to start a school with the goal of fostering young women to be good wives and mothers, knowing that their campus would always be protected by the arch angel St. Michael. Their newest transfer student, Fumio Shijo (Ueno) has just arrived, albeit under difficult circumstances. Fumio’s mother (Satomi Tezuka) has recently died and she found herself in the care of her long-lost affluent older brother (Yusuke Iseya) who thought it best to send her to a school that could teach her virtues worthy of her new lifestyle. Fumio is disappointed at first, having planned on attending Tokyo University and quickly becoming Japan’s Minister of Finance (one of the most powerful positions in the world), but she decides to make the best of it and fake her way through fitting in with her new stuffy classmates.

Things are difficult at first but eventually Fumio discovers she’s not the only faker amongst her peers. One day she’s caught sneaking off to eat ramen by classmates Kazune (Megumi Seki) and Yuzuko (Airi Taira), but instead of being appalled they bond with her, finally feeling free to confess their own love of cheap noodles and trashy novels. Unfortunately while they’re chatting a fire starts and as they attempt to douse it there’s a strange explosion and a flash of light. Somehow they’ve been granted super powers. It’s not really clear if these powers are a blessing from St. Michael or their noodles were manufactured by BALCO but it probably doesn’t really matter. They’re about to need them.

During the school’s annual Garden Party some of their classmates are abducted by a gang of Italian kidnappers led by one of the school’s nuns, Sister Malena (played by smokin’ hot talento Delcea Mihaela Gabriela). The three girls hunt down the gang and confront them on what can only be described as a pirate ship and much super power-augmented butt-kicking ensues. Unfortunately for them Sister Malena is an absurdly resourceful gal and they may need another miracle or two before everything is said and done.

There’s only one true action/combat scene in Arch Angels, but fortunately it’s a good one, coming in at just about 13 minutes long with a ton of fighting and explosions to go around. Ueno’s fighting scenes are particularly impressive and although most of that can be attributed to clever editing and flattering camera angles, she should get props for going into it with attitude and ferocity unlike any teen idol I’ve seen. She holds her own, looking pretty badass while whooping up on 2-3 guys at once and somehow I doubt she has a street fighting background to draw on like Tak Sakaguchi.

The only negative I can possibly drudge up about Arch Angels is that some of its comedy may be lost in translation, a lot like the dialects in Swing Girls. A fair amount of the dialogue’s humor is predicated on switching back and forth between polite and impolite speech at strange moments, like the girls identifying a 99-cent bowl of ramen by saying “o-chicken ramen desu wa” around their classmates, pretty much elevating it to 3-star Michelin status by phrasing it so regally. Also at times they’ll randomly turn into cats, a reference to the term “nekokaburi”, which basically equates to wolf in sheep’s clothing in English but in Japanese they use cats for some reason. To compound the confusion Fumio routinely messes up with slang terminology and has to be corrected by the narrator. Little things like that may slip by unnoticed or just seem strange but there’s still plenty of universal humor to go around whether you understand everything in its intended context or not.

Arch Angels is a movie that throws a lot at you all at once – drama, fantasy, special effects, and comedy. And amazingly, it all works in a cohesive way. I’d even go as far as to say that if you don’t like this movie you probably just don’t like the genre in general. If you’re inclined to be interested in a silly movie where teenage girls feign civility by day and scrap with Italian kidnappers by night this is definitely one to check out.

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Availability: Currently Arch Angels is only available on region 2, NTSC DVD without subtitles. It can be found at CDJapan.

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