Detroit Metal City
Toshio Lee


The story: All Soichi Negishi (Kenichi Matsuyama) wants to do is to sing his sweet, twee songs about love. But he ends up spewing dark fantasies about rape and murder as Johannes Krauser II, the lead singer of a heavy metal band called Detroit Metal City.
The increasingly frustrated singer runs away from Tokyo just before a hotly anticipated showdown with notorious death metal singer Jack Il Dark.


Music soothes the savage beast. But in the case of death metal, music is the savage beast.
Mild-mannered Soichi Negishi gets more than he bargains for when he unwittingly ends up as the lead singer of Detroit Metal City in this comedy based on a best-selling manga. To his horror, the heavy metal band grows ever more popular while there is barely an audience for his cutesy romantic songs.
His monstrous boss (Yasuko Matsuyuki in a total about-turn from her role as the damsel in distress in Suspect X) gives him hell and is so tough that she puts out cigarettes on her tongue.
Wedged between his demonic alter-ego Johannes Krauser II and his unlucky- in-love troubadour self, Negishi ends up bolting for home.
Last seen as the title character in L: Change The World, a spin-off sequel to the popular Death Note big-screen adaptations (2006), Matsuyama carries the film here with his hilarious performance. He convinces you that he is both Negishi and Krauser, alternating between an awkwardly shy geek and a snarling devil spawn.
When the worlds collide, hilarity ensues.
There is the priceless sight gag of Matsuyama running down the chic shopping street of Omotesando in full death metal get-up. He comes to a stop in front of Cute Music Studio, beats his fists against the glass wall in frustration – and succeeds in scaring the little tots inside.
And in the final showdown with Jack Il Dark (Gene Simmons of the metal band Kiss, whose song Detroit Rock City inspired the title of Kiminori Wakasugi’s manga), Detroit Metal City fans stoically endure the melding of the worlds of twee pop and death metal.
Negishi comes to realise that his mantra of “No music, no dream” applies even to death metal. As his mother puts it: “No matter what you look like or how you say it, helping someone dream is amazing.”
Still, you have to ask, what kind of dream exactly?
The reconciliation between pop and metal might not be fully satisfactory, but director Toshio Lee has delivered a funny, riotous and sometimes riotously funny film.
Detroit Metal City is an adaptation that works because it preserves the out-sized drama of manga which death metal, with its make-up and pageantry, is tailor made for. And which Wakasugi would have you believe is all bark and no bite.
(ST)