Fridae

I’m sure there’s a joke ready to be made about how Japanese drama serials these days are not just episodic but all exposition, set-up and no punchline – because the producers want to rope you in with a feature film sequel that will deliver the second and third acts of the story. Security Police: the motion picture is exactly what this joke was made for; it is the first of a two-part feature film conclusion to a 2007 winter action/thriller series about a very special branch of the police dedicated to protecting VIPs and countering terrorism.

As you can guess from the first five action and CGI-packed minutes, all that exposition, plot build-up, character development in the series was just fluff and world-building. This film is the story that the producers of the series really wanted to tell – and it doesn’t matter if you even know about the series.

To wit: a police officer with precognitive abilities, in the course of performing his normal duties, will get enmeshed in a vast conspiracy by a group of Young Turks (whose ambition the film’s Japanese title alludes to) who’d like to inflict maximum chaos in Japan as part of their grab for power. Will his glimpses into the future lead him to the plot? Will he stop them in time? Will he uncover the players and their puppet masters?

It’s a little like The X-Files, I suppose. For me, the charm of SP – aside from its frenetic action and chase sequences – is how the conspiracy theory genre gets subverted. There are conspiracies within conspiracies and then counter-conspiracies to boot, very much like how the government can be likened to a person whose left hand doesn’t know what his right hand is doing, and whose right hand doesn’t know that the person has a third hand.

As an action thriller, the script paces itself admirably, compressing action set-pieces while unveiling the conspiracies into a lean 98 minutes that tell a 48-hour story. As with genre films from Japan, there is a tendency for the cast to overact a little and for the script to overplay its credibility limit a little. If you’re partial to J-dramas, this shouldn’t be too off-putting. In any case, the action set-pieces should still do the trick.