At a certain point, it feels like you’re watching pins
getting lined up for a half-hour, just so a bowling ball can knock them over in
another half-hour...
Granted, that’s the basic conceit underneath every shonen adventure. Nobody
ever watches a new villain get introduced and seriously thinks the hero won’t
be beating him, sooner or later. It’s just that the good shows make you forget that
for a while, while the bad ones make it impossible to pay attention to anything
else.
In this case, the big pin is “Black Arm” Zephyr, and his
cadre of little pins... er… ‘Neo Marines.’ The first 20 minutes are devoted
entirely to setting them up, as they take turns showing their Devil Fruit powers
off. Essentially, Zephyr’s a marine who hates pirates so much,
his hatred actually alienated the Navy's more moderate majority. He falls into the sea
after this battle, and is rescued by the unsuspecting Straw Hats...
Guess how long it’ll take for Zephyr to realize that this
friendly stranger is actually a pirate? I was asking myself that question a lot
- - counting the minutes this complication was keeping us from the next
set piece.
Somehow, Zephyr’s plans escalate. He’s going to blow up some
volcanoes. It’s such a by-the-numbers threat, it feels like it was just
appended on because the staff realized that some innocents had to be threatened
eventually. A sub-plot involving the a third of the Straw Hats getting ‘de-aged’
by one of his subordinates feels just as arbitrary. It has such little actual
bearing on the plot that, again, it feels like they just wanted to riff on the
body-swapping predicament from the ‘Punk Hazard’ arc, and - - hey! - - they hadn’t ever
made the heroes into lil’ heroes before. By the time Zephyr starts expounding
on his bitter and convoluted history with Luffy’s grandfather, it’s hard not to
hear the tally marks getting scratched on the chalk board; filling the ‘plot
development’ quota before these two kick the shit out of each other at the end.
STRONG WORLD managed to feel more substantial. I don’t know
if it was out of character for Nami to be the damsel-in-distress during Shiki’s
power play, but at least her apparent betrayal rooted that movie in a strong
and clear emotional conflict. Z lets
Zephyr jaw a lot about his tortured history, but none of it carries much weight. The only points I’d give Z are for its abstract, grainy style,
which feel far more appropriate to the ONE PIECE than the too-slick sheen
slathered on STRONG WORLD.
That’s the
real trade-off here. Hopefully the next flick will manage to have both. It really is by degrees, like that.
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