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In "Death Note," Lakeith Stanfield portrays a master detective who wears a mask and goes by the code-name L to avoid getting written into a death note and killed.
After years of development hell , finally an American adaptation of Death Note has made it to… well, the small screen, technically, since it’s been picked up for distribution by Netflix.
Even messages about power corrupting otherwise decent people, and vigilantism as a negative force, can't raise Death Note from its unenviable position as a bottom feeder.
That’s the darkly intriguing premise of Death Note, the popular manga written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata, which was turned into a 37-episode anime, and now has been condensed into an American movie.
Like, say, 1979’s Phantasm, which Wingard briefly references in one scene, it boldly toes the line between sharp self-awareness and goofiness—two gears that tend to rub audiences the wrong way no matter what.
In theory, Ryuk is a trickster, à la David Bowie’s Goblin King in “Labyrinth,” but the movie curiously lacks the “be careful what you wish for” dimension so common in this genre, from literary classic “The Monkey’s Paw” to the wish-they-were-better “Wishmaster” horror franchise.
The one twist that gorehound director Adam Wingard (“The Guest”) adds to the mix is the assassinations are executed in the style of a “Final Destination” film.
It’s Death Note by way of Final Destination, a film more focused on cyberpunk-esque visuals and crunchy synth than on any kind of substance.
To be sure, it feigns its interest in both, but Wingard’s film ultimately answers them with a resounding “well, fuck yeah, as long as you can write some Final Destination traps into the mix.”
Instead, Adam Wingard’s adaptation of Death Note takes a different direction altogether, removing the gritty edges from the story in order to make a deliriously gory teensploitation movie that shares an equal amount of connective tissue with the Final Destination franchise as it does Tsugumi Ohba’s original manga.
And the movie too quickly abandons its “Final Destination”-style, Rube Goldberg-ian series of unfortunate deaths.
Light decides to see if a school bully will truly be decapitated if he writes that on a blank page, and Wingard gleefully stages the ensuing carnage like he’s planning to reboot the “ Final Destination ” franchise next.
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Their seemingly innocuous exchange serves as a perfect storm of destiny and chance for Light, who soon finds himself in possession of a “death note” gifted to him by Ryuk (Willem Dafoe), a devil-like figure with a gift for gab who suggests a cross between Emil Jannings’s satanic trickster from F.W. Murnau’s Faust and Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch from William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.
Their seemingly innocuous exchange serves as a perfect storm of destiny and chance for Light, who soon finds himself in possession of a “death note” gifted to him by Ryuk (Willem Dafoe), a devil-like figure with a gift for gab who suggests a cross between Emil Jannings’s satanic trickster from F.W. Murnau’s Faust and Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch from William Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster.
Still, despite a run on Adult Swim, this is the first time “Death Note” will register on the radar of most Americans, and rather than comparing it to the Japanese source, they’ll most likely be reminded of Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult classic “Donnie Darko,” from which director Adam Wingard (“You’re Next”) has taken a page.
Regional relocation is usually a kiss of death for cross-culture products (see: Ghost In The Shell), but Tsugumi Ohba (writer) and Takeshi Obata (illustrator), who created the cult-beloved Death Note manga, were quick to offer praise.
Like, it's the very definition of “whitewashed”, on par with Scarlett Johansson’s recent turn in the American Ghost in the Shell adaptation.
In the complicated and evolving conversation about Asian representation onscreen, adaptation, and erasure, it's not accurate to describe Death Note as replicating the exact outrages of Ghost in the Shell, which kept the cultural trappings of its source material while discarding the actual people.
This year’s Ghost in the Shell reboot, for example, attempted to address its own whitewashing controversy via the poor decision of introducing a whitewashing based twist into the narrative itself, leading to the sound of faces hitting palms in multiplexes across the globe.
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The presence of Hobo With a Shotgun’s Jason Eisener as second-unit director is evident in the gushy splatter FX, which sadly taper off about halfway through the movie.
Embracing the arch artificiality of a super-detective who chews candy while listening to The Wizard of Oz ditties, he revels in the weirdness that Wingard and his screenplay frequently rush over in a futile attempt to create pathos for their onscreen killers.