Among
authors frequently adapted for film and television, Keigo Higashino is
approaching the lofty, bankable heights of Stephen King and Agatha Christie.
American viewers are most likely to be familiar with gritty thrillers based on
his work, such as Into the White Nights and
the South Korean Broken. It is hard
to believe the same pen inspired this light-hearted family caper, but imdb and
wiki wouldn’t lie, would they? Regardless, a widowed father is in for a rough
skiing outing when he tries to recover a lost canister of super anthrax in
Teruyuki Yoshida’s Shippu Rondo (trailer here), which screens
during the 2017 Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film in New York.
Chief
researcher Kazuyuki Kuribayashi was caught flat-footed when he learned his boss
Masaomi Togo allowed an unstable colleague to develop the lethal K-55. To make
matters worse, he takes the bio-weapon with him after he is finally fired for
being nuts. He had intended to extort money from his former employer, but he is
killed in a freak accident shortly after sending his demands.
Of
course, the shtickily loathsome Togo will not go to the authorities, so that
leaves the put-upon Kuribayashi to recover it. All he has to go on is a
transponder frequency and the photo sent by the late mad scientist of a teddy
bear apparently marking the hiding place, somewhere out of bounds at a large
ski resort. At least his petulant middle school son will get a ski trip out of
his dad’s troubles. He also might be able to hep more if Kuribayashi would
start trusting him.
Yes
sir, lessons will be learned by everyone during the course of Shippu, but that’s not necessarily a bad
thing. Most of the cast is rather pleasant to spend time with and there are
some decent skiing/snowboarding chase sequences to its further merit.
Hiroshi
Abe, who has the flexibility to star in Kore-eda family dramas and the Thermae Romae franchise, has plenty of
aw shucks charm, but still manages to project a sense of the widower’s sadness.
Tatsuomi Hamada and Sayu Kubota have way more charisma than you would expect as
his son Hideto and Ikumi Yamasaki, the local girl who befriends him. Tadayoshi
Okura and Yuko Oshima handle the action well enough as the ski patrol member
and prospective Olympian who volunteer to help Kuribayashi. However, there is
no getting around the pain of watching Akira Emoto mug and guffaw as the embarrassing
Togo.
