Some actors have a knack for picking good material. And some, like Shun Oguri, drift from stinker to stinker: ¡°Museum,¡± ¡°Terra Formars,¡± ¡°Galaxy Turnpike,¡± ¡°Lupin the Third.¡±
Still considered a box-office force despite this dismal track record, Oguri stars in ¡°Gintama,¡± the live-action adaptation of Hideaki Sorachi¡¯s long-running gag manga set in an alternative universe where aliens have conquered feudal-era Japan. Directed by Yuichi Fukuda, a comic-action specialist (¡°Hentai Kamen: The Abnormal Crisis¡°), ¡°Gintama¡± is another manga adaptation with too much plot, too many characters and too much emoting at full volume, as though ¡°loud¡± equals ¡°funny.¡± And playing the lazy swordsman hero Gintoki, Oguri spends much screen time with finger inserted in nostril prospecting for nose gold, one of several gross running gags.
But ¡°Gintama¡± is not, on its own terms, a disaster. Gag manga, whose readers are largely maturity-challenged males, are rude and crude by design, and so are the films based on them. By (admittedly low) genre standards, ¡°Gintama¡± does a superior job of extracting laughs from the products of Sorachi¡¯s demented comic imagination, which soars beyond booger jokes to the higher realms of local pop-culture parody.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.