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Perhaps because it's only 50 minutes long, nowhere on the cardboard jacket is this show claimed to be a "movie". One of the impressions I came away with was that the plot was revealed too fast. Another was that what you would think would be shocking revelations--who was betraying who, etc--didn't seem particularly surprising at all. It's not that they were so obvious that I was expecting them; more that the story had developed so fast, with so little time for charachter development, that being told that somebody is in fact a traitor didn't seem surprising at all, since I had never got to know the charachter well enough to be convinced that he or she was one of the "good guys". All in all, rather disappointing in comparison to the quite good City Hunter movies I had previously seen. What saves "Million Dollar Conspiracy" from falling flat is the trademark Joe Saeba charachter. Maybe I should have included "Acquired Taste" in the keywords, but as I see it you gotta love this guy. Even if this relatively mediocre show was your introduction to the world of City Hunter, I doubt if you could help noticing his hilarious dualistic personality, and the chemistry between him and Kaori. After a lukewarm dramatic climax, I immediately found myself laughing as the two resumed their incessant struggle to see if Joe can be hammered into behaving responsibly towards beautiful women. Instead of allowing this standard gag to go stale, it is continually reexamined from fresh angles. I think it's the ability of City Hunter to be both dramatic and humorous which provides a sort of fail-safe mechanism. In this case, the drama was average at best, but fortunately there was still the comedy to fall back on. Kamiya Akira is a superb voice actor, and no doubt it would be considered sacriledge to include any non-Japanese person in the "Notables" category, but I think Martin Blacker (Joe) and Pamela Ribon (Kaori) deserve some recognition for their fine work on the dubbed versions of the various City Hunter movies. 5/03 Last updated Friday, February 08 2008. Created Sunday, May 18 2003. | ||||||||
