Movie Review: Death Note

Death Note * / *****

Directed by: Adam Wingard.

Written by: Charley Parlapanides & Vlas Parlapanides and Jeremy Slater based on the manga by Tsugumi Ôba and Takeshi Obata.

Starring: Nat Wolff (Light Turner), Lakeith Stanfield (L), Margaret Qualley (Mia Sutton), Shea Whigham (James Turner), Willem Dafoe (Ryuk - voice), Jason Liles (Ryuk), Paul Nakauchi (Watari).

 

It wasn’t that long ago that I believed director Adam Wingard was going to become one of the giant names in American horror films. That was on the strength of his film A Horrible Way to Die, You’re Next, The Guest and segments in the VHS films. When Wingard had little budget, he came up with great ideas, and made great films. You cannot begrudge him for trying for something bigger from there. His remake/reboot of Blair Witch last year was fine – nothing great, but it worked. But now comes Death Note – a Netflix original, based on a manga and anime series, which horribly misguided in many ways – some of which, like the script, perhaps we cannot blame on Wingard – but some we truly can. The film feels like it was made by someone who has no idea how to make a film. What the hell happened to Wingard here? Whatever it is, it doesn’t bode well for his future, bigger projects.

 

The concept of the movie is a good one – teenager Light Turner (Nat Wolff) finds a notebook entitled Death Note – and inside, there are many rules, but it basically boils down to this – you write someone’s name in the book, and they die. This book was dropped by Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe), a death demon of a sort, who has been playing this game for humans for centuries, because it amuses him to see human struggle with their morality. At first, Light seems conflicted – he uses the book to decapitate the school bully, but he didn’t really think it would work when he wrote his name down. Then he kills the man who got away with killing his mother. And from there, he decides to become an avenging angel of a sort – killing all the bad people in the world who need killing. Because he can control them for a while before they die, he even starts making them all write down the name Kira in Japanese before dying – and soon the world thinks there is a real avenging angel taking care of business. And then, an eccentric detective known as L (Lakeith Stanfield) becomes involved – and wants to stop Kira.

 

This is an intriguing premise – and I’ll believe the many (many) people who loved the manga and the anime series (I watched a few episodes of that and liked it well enough). But the material needs to be necessarily dark and morally murky -= even if Light has good intentions, he’s killing a lot of people, and eventually it may reach a point where he has to kill not because someone “deserves” to die (whatever that means) – but to protect himself. The movie, however, wants to keep Light sympathetic the whole way through – the hero of the movie, rather than the anti-hero. The single biggest mistake the film makes is giving Light a love interest – this is the Goth cheerleader Mia (Margaret Qualley) – who Light tells almost immediately about the book and its power – and that turns her on. Soon, they are a duo in more ways than one. The film seems to be edging towards making Mia in the anti-hero of the story – making her darker, but it pulls back there as well.

 

What happens then is that the film is basically a cat and mouse game between Light and L – and not a very well done one at that. Stanfield is a gifted actor – and he really is terrific as L (or as terrific as he could be) – he almost reminded me of Christopher Walken, if for no other reason than because he possesses the same ability to be in an absolute crap movie, go massively over-the-top  and still be the best thing in it. Ryuk is wasted – he is basically a giant special effect, and not a particularly good one at that, and Dafoe is unable to make even his voice sound that menacing (this could be because the screenplay is so awful, that it doesn’t give Ryuk anything to say).

 

The ending of the movie sets up a sequel that we can only hope never happens. Wingard is a talented filmmaker – those earlier, lower budgeted film are great (The Guest made my top 10 list that year, and You’re Next is one of my favorite straight ahead horror films of recent years). The screenplays (by Simon Barrett – apparently uninvolved here) certainly helped – but the awful dialogue doesn’t explain why it seems like Wingard forgot how to direct a coherent sequence. Death Note is one of the year’s worst films – and coming from Wingard, one of the year’s biggest disappointments as well.