Sometimes it's nice when a film informs us straightaway what it's going to be. The opening scene is so cartoonish, with deliberately low-grade special effects, that at first blush it makes 'Kung fu hustle' look like 'The godfather.' Forevermore thereafter it remains unabashedly outrageous and over the top, including wildly forthright and overcooked dialogue, narrative and scene writing, and plot development; gleefully exaggerated characterizations, commonly realized through unfettered animated acting; kooky costume design, hair, and makeup; cheesy music; and more. Splatter comedy, puerile teen comedy, sports comedy, absurdism, flavors of outright "torture porn," intimations of a backwards vigilante superhero origin story, touches of action-comedy spoof, childishness recalling Ernest P. Worrell: all this and more, with production values that at best most closely resemble The Asylum, and direction, storytelling, and acting pulled directly from a twelve-year old's immature and undeveloped imagination. I'llsay this for 'Deadball,' it knows exactly what it is and is fully committed as it leans into the ridiculousness.
When I say "cartoonish," and when I say "production values that at best most closely resemble The Asylum," I surely mean it. There wasn't even the slightest effort to control impulses here; writer Tokaji Keita, director Yamaguchi Yudai, and producers Chiba Yoshinori and Torishawa Shin just let their imaginations run loose, and included anything and everything they conjured. Narrative cohesion and judicious, sensible storytelling is way beside the point; this movie joyfully tosses everything including the kitchen sink, no matter how far-fetched, garish, or preposterous, and does the bare minimum necessary to write a story around all such ideas. Just as much to the point, there wasn't the slightest effort of quality control; The Asylum is perhaps too generous a point of reference, for everything on hand, and not least the "special effects," seem like they were ripped from the most purposefully inorganic, inauthentic, artificial bluster possible. Think of "live-action" fare on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block - the type of fare where part of the joke is in making everything look and sound as fake and awful as could be done. 'Deadball' is the simple-minded, unsophisticated entertainment of Nickelodeon that's built for elementary school kids, and layered with the sensibilities of adults who are thirty going on thirteen, only summoned out of Japan instead of the United States.
Provided you're receptive to the consciously gauche insipidness, then recognizing that everything herein is purely intentional, I can't say it's not suitably well done on its chosen level. Some little odds and ends are unexpectedly sharp, like the lighting, or the practical effects; when we get to the point just before the halfway mark when the baseball team of "Saint Black Dahlia High School" is introduced, it's obvious that an unexpected level of care was put into the moment. To that same point, like other select examples in cinema, television, or even the advertising world, there's unbound potential in the concept of an ordinary sport taken to gnarly extremes borne of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. I'll even say that this "game" in the central portion between St. Black Dahlia and the "Pterodactyl Gauntlets" is fairly clever overall, and definitely a top highlight of the whole. The cast fully embrace the vacuousness, and in the very least I can't help but admire their gusto.with Sakaguchi Tak, Hoshino Mari, and the Black Dahlias all standing out a little more than others. The feature even earned some laughs!
On the other hand, 'Deadball' is very intent on practicing the male gaze, especially with regards to St. Black Dahlia High. The shtick wears thin very quickly, tiresomely relying on abject shock value, unyielding ludicrousness, and infantile boorishness - with a dire paucity of any of the wit necessary for any of it to be funny, or more than baseline amusing. And while I'm quite serious when I say that the picture earned some laughs, it was all too easy to count them: a total of only three over 99 minutes. It was, not too surprisingly, the most unembellished, low-key bits, a humble upending of expectations contrasting heavily with the predominant bloody, gory bombast, that actually evoked the intended reaction. The harder this tries, the less engaging it becomes; the amount of fun we can genuinely have here is significantly smaller than we may inclined to believe based on the far-out premise. Awkwardly, in the last twenty minutes or so it's readily evident that Tokaji really was aiming for more complete, considered narrative writing as the tone shifts, but it seems this is not within the man's skill set, for it is very plainly where the title is weakest. Just as much to the point, by that time we've been so exhausted by what 'Deadball' has otherwise had to offer that we just can't care about the home stretch. Factor in a perfectly unnecessary, persistent strain of homophobia on top of everything else, and my already middling favor falls far further.
There were good ideas here. For the most part they were abused or misused, and amount to far too little when stood next to the overbearing choices that mostly define the film. Where it does something well, I wish it did more of these things so I could like it more; for what it does poorly, falling well short of its potential, it's more likely that I'm being too kind in my assessment. I don't entirely hate this, yet the value that it provides is just too little, and our time is probably just better spent somewhere else in the first place. I guess there are worse flicks you could watch, but the fact of the matter is that there's no compelling reason to look for 'Deadball' in the first place. Check it out if you like, and have a good time; I have better stuff to do, and I won't be revisiting this.
