ReviewFrom Today, It’s My Turn!! movie review: Japanese manga adaptation is both ridiculous and undeniably charming
- Two teenagers (Kento Kaku and Kentaro Ito) contend with gangs and girls in a high school world almost entirely detached from reality
- The pace and huge cast of characters can become overwhelming, but director Yuichi Fukada somehow manages to hold things together
3/5 stars
A pair of absurdly coiffed delinquents navigate the violent, hormone-fuelled hellscape of their small-town high school in From Today, It’s My Turn!!, Yuichi Fukada’s big-screen sequel to the TV series of the same name, itself adapted from Hiroyuki Nishimori’s manga comic books.
Interspersed between the endless brawling and personal grooming, Mitsuhashi (Kento Kaku) and Ito (Kentaro Ito) must contend with the everyday teenage trials of girlfriends, classroom rivalries and schoolyard betrayals. The film’s breakneck pacing and huge cast of characters is at times overwhelming, especially to anyone unfamiliar with the source material and its snake pit of intertwining relationships, but Fukada somehow keeps the whole circus on the rails.
Nominally set in the 1980s, the film opens in a state of anarchy. With the high school now leaderless, gangs from all over town are moving in to take control of Mitsuhashi and Ito’s home turf. Chief among these is Yanagi (Yuya Yagira), a vicious hoodlum fresh out of jail who commands a large following of pugnacious foot soldiers.
Mitsuhashi discovers he has been wrongly targeted by Ryoko (Maika Yamamoto), a sword-wielding student out to avenge her hapless cousin. He is also trying to fend off a new suitor who has taken a liking to his girlfriend, Riko (Nana Seino), herself a proficient aikido student.
Ito, meanwhile, is in love with Kyoko (Kanna Hashimoto), the formidable leader of the school’s all-female gang, and when they are together, both drop their tough facades and revert to a vomit-inducing pool of kawaii cutsieness that repels all onlookers.
Takashi Miike’s Crows Zero covered similar ground, but Fukuda’s exaggerated, anime-informed style could not be more different in its execution. This world is almost entirely detached from reality. Adults exist only on the periphery and comprise almost entirely of parents and teachers, who appear every bit as weird and incomprehensible as the teenagers.
Characterisation throughout is broad and cartoonish, the camerawork and editing fast and frenzied, while the scraps and skirmishes are played for laughs and prove largely inconsequential. Violence is inflicted to mark territory and exert authority rather than cause lasting damage. That is, until Yanagi introduces a knife into the roughhousing, and with it a genuine sense of peril.
As with the best of Fukuda’s work, like Hentai Kamen and Kids Police, From Today, It’s My Turn!! is propelled by a disarming innocence which infuses the action with an undeniable charm.
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