Midnight Eye: Gokuu II

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS. SUMMARY: Goku Midnight Eye 2 starts out just as goofy and fun as the first part, but devolves into a way more grim and frankly unpleasant watch that was not my cup of tea. If you like 80s style anime gore without a deep story or characters, and just like the action as animated by Madhouse, this is the OVA for you. If you want something in the vein of the fun and goofy action from the first OVA, you will be very disappointed, as this one contains way less (unintentional?) comedy and way more questionable drama. Goku Midnight Eye 2 startsoff with what's basically a "cold open", a sequence completely unrelated to the main story. Here, we get a stakeout in an exclusive rooftop club, and soon enough a hilarious chase sequence ensues where our protagonist and the sleazebag mafia man he's after slide around on rooftops. It's directly in the tone of the previous movie, and I really like it. However, if you are like me and you came for the 80s OVA goofiness, then you should seriously stop watching after this sequence and just pretend it was a short. What follows is a main story that really wasn't what I expected or hoped for, and ended up being a serious buzzkill. As so often, your mileage may vary, but in my opinion Part 2 of Goku Midnight Eye isn't nearly as enjoyable as Part 1. Part 2's tone quickly shifts to a far more grim and dark one. While Part 1 had a good balance in my opinion to keep things fun, Part 2 goes for a proper overtuned noir story with more gore, a darker backstory and more graphic violence against women in particular. The plotline follows a woman asking Goku's help to save her brother, who turns out to have been subjected to intense brainwashing and medical experiments. He's a complete killer machine, and the amount of gore and violence has gone up as a result. Later on, a prostitute is basically raped to death. 'Nuff said. The movie's animation has also changed as a result - We see way less of the colorful, moody Cyberpunk aesthetic and more drab backgrounds and colors. The action is toned down in its fun romp-like quality and gets way more serious and gorey. The plot is still nonsense, but instead of being made to enable a goofy, fun time like the first OVA, it feels more as a very basic setup to excuse more brutal scenes. Absolutely not my cup of tea. I don't need every story to be deep, but gore for the sake of gore is not for me. BOTTOM LINE: I personally cannot recommend this part of Goku Midnight Eye. The dreary art, the way harsher tone and the excess of violence and gore for the sake of it really didn't do it for me. I found some of the scenes outright appalling. The story makes no well executed attempts to justify its brutality - It feels like a proper exploitation movie, and that's not my thing. CONTENT WARNINGS: Plenty of gore, brainwashing and medical torture, explicit portrayals of rape and murder, more sexism than the first OVA too.

Unfortunately, “Midnight Eye: Gokuu II” doesn’t measure up to its prequel. This OVA has a strong start that continues the goofy outrageousness found throughout the first “Gokuu,” but it quickly settles in to the main story, which is somewhat depressing and — dare I say it — boring. The main story starts about five minutes in, and it centers on a mysterious woman named Ryoko, who hired Gokuu to find her missing brother, Ryu. However, she’s not being completely forthright with Gokuu about the circumstances behind Ryu’s disappearance, or much of anything else, for that matter. As Gokuu hunts down the Terminator-like Ryu, who has beengenetically experimented on and has unusual powers which basically consist of him growling and emitting red light, Gokuu gradually unravels the truth behind Ryu, Ryoko and their adoptive father. The plot begins promisingly, with robotic hover dogs chasing Gokuu and Ryoko down in a sewer and Gokuu using his eye to defeat them, but things slide into boringness after that. The rest of his enemies are just people — evil people, sure, and genetically modified, yeah. But they lack the exotic silliness of the naked motorcycle robot woman, the guy with robotic bugs stored in his head, or the hypnosis-inducing peacock woman from the prequel. They’re just generic bad guys, and therefore aren’t fun to watch at all. There are also some inconsistencies in the dialogue and how the characters act, which makes things confusing. Gokuu still utters his iconic one-liners — just about everything that comes out of his mouth is pure cheese — but even those aren’t enough to make the majority of this OVA enjoyable. And a bizarre twist is casually thrown in during the last few minutes which throws a wet blanket on top of everything else. As far as technical aspects go, “Gokuu II” is about on par with the original — decent animation, aesthetically pleasing character designs, average voice acting and music. The ending theme is the same as the prequel’s. There is quite a bit of explicit content in this OVA, including two rape scenes, a sex scene, some sexist dialogue, and graphic violence, including beheadings. There are also a lot of flashing lights. Overall, “Gokuu II” is not nearly as fun as the first one (except for the first five minutes or so), and the grim and boring story it tries to tell does not make up for that. I would not recommend watching this unless you’re a completionist and can stomach the explicit content.

"Battle of the bullshit powers" I recently saw the first installment into this duology, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. The animation quality and the 'style' of that film were both fantastic, which elevated it for me in spite of the lamest main character in the world (fully equipped with nonsensical bullshit powers that vary in strength depending on what the scene requires) and a very teenage-boy attitude that permeated the entire thing (which can be fun when it's not done to excess, and I think the first installment straddled the line quite well, if we disregard some very silly one-liners). However, this is areview regarding the second installment, so now that I've set the scene... It is a much lesser film. It keeps all the bad things of the first installment, while decreasing the quality of what made the first film so memorable. The story is passable, and probably better than what we saw in the first installment, but other than that it's pretty much all downhill. One of the best features of the first film, the animation quality, has deteriorated. The art is still quite well done, but we now see a lot of repeated animation sequences, often with so few frames of animation that it is very noticeable. The powers of the main opponent seem to be designed mostly for ease of animation (slap a red bubble on him and a few squiggly lines while he stands still and it's pretty much good to go). The main characters powers are as silly as ever. He extends his staff to pole-vault out of skyscrapers, he pole-vaults with such excellence that he can easily catch up to speedboats, and so on. His attitude and outfit are both as absurd as they were in the first film, and his 'hack into any machine at any time' seems to have very strange specific requirements, because he only ever seems to be able to hack into and control machines when it would allow for a 'cool' scene, never to be able to easily breeze through and kill/evade his opponents at any time he would want to. He can hack into any computer at any time which allows him to control various monitor-screens, construction-equipment and even satellites, but a speedboat? No, would never work of course, a bad guy is using it. His powers are so extensive and absurd that he just has to either forget that he has them or the enemy needs to have elaborate coincidences work in their favor so that he can't use them, otherwise he'd just win every encounter always without a hitch (which pretty much happens anyway, but still). When the film brought out the technology called "inter-dimensional missiles" I knew that the writers were just making shit up without any regard to rhyme or reason. This isn't a movie that is silly enough for inter-dimensional missiles to exist. Nope, I can't recommend this. It's just not good. It's not a complete waste of time to watch if you are inclined to do so, but the first film gives you everything this one does but much, much better.

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