Monday, June 4, 2018

Violence Jack (1986, 1988 and 1990)

Violence Jack is three one hour anime movies. I learned about it from one anime reviewer's joke about how horrible it was. It made me interested about it. I had to check it when I found it. After seeing all movies I have to say the joke is better than the movies. It made them look much better than the movies actually are.

Violence Jack is about three meters tall human shaped concentration of violence. He wanders around Japan after comet has made it post apocalyptic wasteland. All movies follow Mad Max 2 formula. Violence Jack meets regular people who are harassed by bad guys. Then he joins regular people to fight the bad guys. Movies are based on Manga which was released before Mad Max 2 but movies feel they were heavily influenced by Mad Max 2.

Best way to describe Violence Jack is boring exploitation Mad Max anime. There is something interesting beneath. Probably from manga. But movies are just post apocalyptic exploitation. Evil Town, which happened underground where people were separated into three factions, had most to offer. But it was ruined by having characters so one dimensional they were copies of each others.

One movie has scene where bad guys shoot Violence Jack with automatic weapons for almost a minute and boss gets bored because Jack doesn't fall down. It is that kind of anime. There is nothing in stake. Jack is immortal force of nature. There is nothing intellectual about it. First bad guys are doing evil things. Then Jack comes to kill then and he has to fight the boss at the end.

I don't know how cut version I saw. It didn't have anything worse than live action exploitation movies. Movies doesn't have anything memorable. Setting was interesting but characters needed more dimensions and Violence Jack needed to be force of nature who couldn't be reasoned with or someone who could actually get hurt. One guy threw knife at Jack's eye and Jack acted like nothing happened. He didn't kill the guy because script had other "more impactful" death for the character.

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