Matt Reviews: Death Note (2017)

WARNING: SPOILERS to come

So it happened again, huh? I guess we didn’t learn anything from Dragonball: Evolution.

For those unfamiliar with the story of Death Note, here’s how the movie presents it:

Light Turner (played by Nat Wolff) is a troubled, yet highly intelligent high school boy. (We know he’s incredibly intelligent because he does people’s homework for them for money.) His father is a cop, yet was unable to do anything to prevent the man who killed Light’s mother from getting off. But then Light comes in possession of a Death Note, and meets the death god Ryuk (Willem Dafoe). As Ryuk explains, if you write someone’s name down in the Death Note, that person dies. The writer can also personalize how the person dies, what time they die, and can even influence a person’s actions for a short time before their death. So Light – along with his love interest-turned-girlfriend Mia Sutton (Margaret Qualley) – set out to right the wrongs of the world by killing off the world’s worst killers and scumbags under the name “Kira” (the Japanese word for “killer”). The only person who has the power to stand in Light’s way is an enigmatic private investigator known as L (Lakeith Stanfield), who is determined to stay one step ahead of Kira and figure out their true identity.

So getting the elephant in the room out of the way, this is not a good adaptation of the Death Note anime. It takes everything that made the original work great and turns them so backwards and generic that they’re near unrecognizable. Light is an utterly unlikeable protagonist. In the anime, Light Yagami (not “Turner”, like this stupid Americanization made him) is a star pupil, a popular kid, and a model son. His surface appearance as an all-around good boy only serves to mask the sociopathic serial killer with a god complex underneath, and the series focuses a lot on Light’s games to try and keep this appearance up.

The movie, however, decides to portray him as every troubled emo stereotype rolled into one. He’s moody, he’s an outcast, he’s got stupid bleached hair, and while the movie tries to claim he’s highly intelligent, we don’t really see that. The movie also invents that new backstory about his mother being killed, and while it does provides a baseline for his motivation to kill killers, I found him much more interesting of a character when he came from a normal home and upbringing, yet still managed to be a troubled criminal mastermind. Above all, Light is supposed to be a cool character, and this movie completely ruined whatever sense of intrigue we were supposed to feel for this character when he flips out and screams like a little girl when he first meets Ryuk.

His girlfriend Mia (the movie’s version of Misa Amane), isn’t much better. She’s so far removed from the anime character she’s an adaptation of that I can barely call her the same character. But, once again, the movie gets it wrong, but not in an entirely unwelcome way. First off, she’s Light’s girlfriend in the movie. In the anime, Misa was deliriously in love with Light for what he’s done as Kira, but Light has no real emotional connection to her and uses her feelings for him to his own twisted, calculated needs. With Light’s reciprocated feelings, it turns their dynamic from a Joker-and-Harley-Quinn relationship to an indie movie teen couple who bond over murder. However, it does change Mia’s/Misa’s character so that she is more ruthless than Light in the movie, with her crossing lines that he wouldn’t have and making her a more antagonistic, Lady MacBeth-type character. It didn’t exactly make me like her more, but it did make her more memorable and interesting than Anime Misa.

"You've spun your last web, Spider-Man!"

There are a few characters the movie gets right. Not a lot, but a few. Well, two. First of all is Ryuk, the death god-demon-thing. Willem Dafoe was the perfect casting choice for this guy. He’s got the voice, he’s got the mannerisms, and he’s got the creepy face for Ryuk. (Though, that may have been CGI in the movie.) They changed his character so that he now actively participates in goading Light to use the Death Note – and even carries out the Note’s death sentences in one scene – rather than just being a third party observer like in the show, but this didn’t bother me too much. What did bother me was how, even though the movie tried to increase his role in Light’s killings, Ryuk was still pushed to the sidelines. He’s supposed to be constantly there over Light’s shoulder doling out snarky quips and eating apples, kind of like an angel or devil on his shoulder. Here, he just kind of drops in and out of the story whenever the plot needs him. He’s gone for so many scenes that you almost forget about him completely until he shows up again. Also, the movie features a scene where Light finds a note in the Death Note warning him not to trust Ryuk, but nothing comes of this.

L is also a bright spot in this hot mess. They wrote him close to how the anime depicted him – a quirky introvert who responds to everything with levelheaded logic – and you can tell the actor is trying hard to portray that personality. The problem is that the character’s personality and his physical appearance in this movie don’t really add up. He’s much too well groomed and good-looking to be entirely believable as the character they’ve set up for L. It seems more like the character design they had for Light would work better for L, and the character design for L would work better for Light.

The movie also kind of derails L’s character towards the climax. After Light kills L’s butler, guardian and best (and possible only) friend Watari, L goes off the deep end and tries to kill Light, whom he correctly deduces to be Kira. While this does add more of a human connection to the character by showing that he can be emotional when a big part of his life was taken from him, it also betrays the calm tactical mind that the movie had tried to set up beforehand. However, to the actor's credit, he gives a much more convincing performance during this last half. Ironically enough, he gives some of the best performances in the movie when he stops trying to act like the character he's trying to portray.

Also, the movie throws in this concept where L meets up with his clients in person, concealing his identity through a hood and a mask that covers half his face. (In the anime, he strictly meets with clients over the phone or the Internet, and heavily modulates his voice so it’s harder to find him. He only ever meets people in person if he personally chooses them to be trustworthy.) L reveals his face to Light in an attempt to prove he is Kira, but after that, he seems to ditch the “hiding his face in public” thing altogether. It just seems like whatever character they were trying to establish at the beginning, it’s not the same character we wound up with.

The pacing is one of the biggest issues of this movie, due to the fact that it tries to cram so much into one movie. In an hour and forty minutes, it tries to introduce our protagonists, introduce Light to the Death Note and Ryuk, have him start killing people, bring Mia into his secret life, have them both killing people, amassing a following as Kira, introduce L, have him investigate Light and correctly deduce that he is Kira, and have an ongoing cat-and-mouse game playing between Light, L, and the police. That’s practically half the original series right there, and they desperately try to squeeze all this into a single hundred-minute film. Naturally, it constantly feels rushed and there’s no real time to get a grasp on what the characters are.

"Oh my god, please sit like a normal person."
"No. I'm Batman."

As much as I’ve complained about the changes they made from the anime, I do not mind when adaptations alter things from the source material. Changes keep adaptations from just being the same exact thing over again, and as long as the changes still keep the heart of the story and characters true to the original, I don’t mind them. Here, this barely holds the soul of what Death Note is. Death Note is this cerebral crime drama. It’s a Machiavellian game of cat-and-mouse between two opposing super genius constantly at odds to stop the other and find out each other’s true identities. It forces you to accept a mass murderer as your protagonist, and you can’t help but want him to win because he’s just so damn compelling of a character.

None of that is here. There’s no rivalry between Light and L, and they definitely don’t feel like intellectual equals. L’s a detective, sure, but Light is no schemer. He only just barely manages to weasel his way out of situations, and even then, L and his dad still manage to put two and two together. There’s a scene where L holds him at gunpoint after tracking him down following Watari’s death, and Light basically confesses right there that he’s Kira while sniveling like a baby. This is supposed to be Light? This is supposed to be L’s great rival? No, this is just some dork with bleached hair who came upon great power, and whose girlfriend is more of a ruthless schemer than he is.

The only time where Light’s character feels true and where the movie starts to feel like classic Death Note is at the ending, where Light singlehandedly orchestrates Mia’s death, manipulates criminals to save his life and continue the killings while he is in a coma to throw off the scent, has those criminals dispose of themselves, and manages to negate the effects of a page where Mia wrote that Light’s heart will stop at midnight (the movie adds in a loophole that a written death with not have an effect if the page is burned before the time of death is reached). And while it is cool to see Light act like the chessmaster he’s supposed to be in this adaptation, it doesn’t feel earned. This the same guy who, only a few scenes prior, blurted out to L at gunpoint that a page of the Death Note was hidden in Mia’s textbook, which possibly leads to his ambiguous demise. The movie may be trying to show how someone like Movie Light could grow to become a schemer like Anime Light, but I didn’t believe it.

I watched this movie with two different people: someone who had seen the anime like me, and someone unfamiliar with Death Note. Neither one of them thought it was a good movie. It tries much to hard to be “edgy” and “mature”, throwing around F-bombs and over-the-top gore. I’m not sure if it was trying to go for something more serious, but I don’t think there’s a single scene in this movie I could take seriously, from Light’s wimpy characterization to the bombastic 80’s-inspired soundtrack often ruining scenes of suspense to a kid getting half his head exploded off when a ladder slams into his face. (And yes, in a movie with magic notebooks and death gods, this scene is still one of the most unbelievable.)

My friend who had never seen Death Note said that the movie had a good concept, but was weighed down by everything else. Had there been no other Death Note properties prior to this, this movie would stand on its own as a corny teen romance indie movie-meets-Final Destination mash-up that’s trying to hard to be dark and edgy, with an interesting concept buried underneath. But it’s a real shame that with such a unique and compelling series that the movie can’t do it justice and doesn’t do well at making others interested in the Death Note universe.

"It's not a diary, Mom! It's a journal!"

If I ever watch this movie again, it’ll probably be one of those movies I put on with my friends to make fun of. It’s not a “so bad it’s good movie” all the way through, but it is a textbook example of how badly America can mess up when they make adaptations of Japanese anime. They took a smart TV show and turned it into a dumb movie.

Final verdict: 4/10.

Oh, and the movie also fails because it doesn’t include the famous potato chip scene. It’s like they didn’t even try to be Death Note.