Cowboy Bebop (2021)

Cowboy Bebop (2021)

Okay cowboy beboppers, let’s get down to it

I only watched the original “Cowboy Bebop” 90s anime a week before this remake came out, and I suspect your reaction to this will depend on your relationship with the original. The more you liked the anime, the less you’ll like this.

I was … ambivalent about the series. It felt like a mishmash of elements the writer thought were cool—rolled-up sleeves on pastel blue suits, jazz music, space ships and bounty hunters, floating islands above glass-domed cities—just sort of slapped together for funsies. The dry humor hits right (blowtorch to light a cigarette, fantastic), but it has problems showing its female protagonist, Faye Valentine, in any kind of normal clothing or pose, and it appears to have borrowed its concept of male cool from Japanese high school dramas. 

Sorry, this wasn’t my anime gateway drug. I’d already seen and gotten over Ghost in the Shell and Akira by this point, and despite living in Japan hadn’t even heard of this until, geez, maybe five or six years ago. One of those things that made a bigger splash overseas than at home, it seems. No fond memories, then, no awakening to the world of animation.

So I’m equally lukewarm on its live-action successor.

Some days you be cowboy bebopping, some days you be cowboy bebopped

For me, the Hollywood remake is a solid B-. Episodes run an hour instead of the original 20 minutes, and the bulk of that extra is padded with toe-curling unfunny “banter” but it’s got just enough spark to keep you going. Every time I thought about giving up, there would be one good scene that actually works—the teddy bear “Ichabod” scene, for example—just enough that you keep on watching in the hopes of hitting that high again.

John Cho is a little bit too shiny smooth and button bright to convincingly play criminal hitman-gone-straight Spike Spiegel, and his wardrobe (along with almost everybody else’s) just proves how bizarre the original space-Lupin III character concept was. Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye (Daniella Pineda) come off a little better, more rounded characters than their animated counterparts, though Daniella is stuck with some of the worst dialog (alas, repeating the punchline of a joke three or four times in succession does not make it any funnier) and a borderline-creepy lesbian sex scene. Ah well. At least she gets to wear relatively normal clothes in most of the episodes.

Much of it is shot like the 60s Batman TV series using a camera with a broken tripod so half the scenes are at a 20-degree angle, with paper-thin backdrop sets, stiff and stylized action sequences someone probably had to restrain themselves from adding “POW!” effects to. That would work if it was a kind of homage to the 60s era action shows, but half the story is this edgy, bloody rivalry between Spike and mafia capo Vicious (Alex Hassell) that doesn’t fit the tone at all.

Neither a cowboy bebopper nor a cowboy bebopperer be

Perhaps the minds behind TMNT and Thor 2 were not the ideal ones to entrust with this property. As I said, the show is oddly divided between whacky interstellar hijinks, eco-terrorists turning people into trees, people watching things oblivious to a massive fight taking behind their backs, that kind of thing, then goes diving into the Spike versus Vicious with its much bloodier and heavier themes of being stuck in one’s past. For my taste there’s too much faux-cool posturing, not enough Mandalorian in a pastel blue suit bounty hunting.