Yo-Yo Girl Cop (2006)

Well, I should have known better, when I read "A Kenta Fukasaku Film", but how could I resist a movie about a movie about a girl going undercover in a tough highschool, armed with a Yo-Yo? But the son of the great Kinji Fukasaku (BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANIY) proves that the destroying of his father's BATTLE ROYALE by making the utterly bad sequel was no accident but proof of his lack of talent as a filmmaker.

YO-YO GIRL COP is the revival of a film- and tv-series from ther 80s, and I don't know much about the earlier incarantions of the yo-yo-wielding girls. But you don't need no background information to understand the new movie. There is a new website that teaches kids how to make bombs and brainwashes them into suicide bombers. After a female undercover cop blows herself up, the police forces the tough daughter of the original Yo-Yo Girl Cop into investigating the school, where the killed cop played the role of a student. Why does the police enlist that girl, who gets the moniker "Saki Asamiya", when she hasn't any training and an extremely bad attitude to boot? Well, ask Kenta Fukasaku....

J-Pop singer Aya Matsuura is cast as Saki, her main adversary and two more important roles are played by the members of pop group "Biyuuden" and all four girls are better than one would think. Especially Rika Ishikawa is nicely menacing as a bad girl with a sweet smile and a deadly Yo-Yo. And the Girl Cop herself, Aya Matsuura, can run and strike good poses, even if her fighting and Yo-Yo-wielding aren't so hot. But with a good director and an acceptable screenplay, she would have made a fun action heroine - in a strictly popcorn sense, of course.

But alas, the plot is utterly diffuse and scattered. The movie needs twenty minutes to start (even though we have a nice fight scene in the first couple of minutes), and is very unfocused. Even the action scenes are not very satisfactory. Okay, it is nice and ironic, when our tough Yo-Yo cop gets hit by her own weapon, when she first uses it, but it is only funny once. An action hero needs to be competent, even in a trashy action comedy.
Worst of all are the sociological and political implications, that are nearly as harebrained and dumb as in BATTLE ROYALE II with its al-Quaida-like rebels without a brain. Here we have to swallow that the pure existence of a website lets every viewer become an anachist and suicide bomber. Well, even V FOR VENDETTA, a somewhat better film, lost me with that witless statement that you can start a revolutin just be telling people they havve to rebel.

So, to wrap this thing up, what do we have here: A wannabe trashy nobrainer with a cute and constantly frowning girl in miniskirts and with a yo-yo; some fight scenes, one or two of wich are at least fun to watch, and a quite inept director who seems to be the son of Ed Wood and not of Kinji Fukasaku. Notwithstanding this underwhelming film I hope that there will be more YO-YO GIRL COP in the future, because I like the idea very much – and Aya isn't a worse action actress than Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu (but don't get me started on their miserabel CHARLIE'S ANGELS abominations).