The biggest issue is that Angel Cop is an action series without good action. The opening episode has a particularly profane death, but it's the only one of its kind, ignoring the fact a 9mm isn't even going to do that much damage, from that point onward, they incidentally throw in something to try and match the original one, but none of them have any impact to speak of. This particular death early on is notable on the grounds that it happens during the action, when some bloke is trying to clear a room (and not die while doing so), he sees someone gets blasted so hard there is no more skin on their face, a reminder of their mortality. Doesn’t come again, the only other instance you’ll get of gore is when someone’s got no reason to be at all worried, when the man’s got a cigarette in one hand, a cup of tea in another, and probably going to start playing Candy Crush on his phone once he’s finished his tea, he is not threatened in the slightest, point is, there is no impact, the gore has no impact, it doesn’t accentuate the action scenes, the parts where people are getting shot and killed, it only comes about when there is no tension to speak of, there are many ways to apply gore to a series, and this is probably the most flavourless one there is, feels like looking at product placement.
Still, I’m off target, I should speak about the actual action scenes themselves, wherein I’m not the only one who’s missing their target, these people aim more like child soldiers than elite soldiers, and it’s not made any better by the fact when people get shot they barely even notice half the time, it’s like watching a fight between video game NPCs who aren’t allowed to die unless the player shoots at them, either that or it’s a multiplayer game and someone forgot to turn off headshots only.
But, I suppose that’s not enough, you can’t have an action series with bad action scenes, they just had to make a story that’s bare gobshite on top of that. It starts off with a basic enough premise, far-left terrorists (who are under the command of Jewish bankers) are trying to cause the collapse of Japan, the greatest world power, so main character Angel, a motorcycle cop, is tasked with killing the terrorists, which she does via the Dirty Harry school of policing, which states that if anyone talks to you they are a terrorist and you get to kill them. Fine by me, terrorists are dickheads anyway, just make a show about some outlaw biker (that’s basically what she is) killing terrorists and stopping their plan to terrorise. But then they changed it.
Anachronisms are never good. In their most common form, they are a symptom of a writer not actually knowing their setting, or not caring, and the major anachronism in Angel Cop falls under the latter category, the anachronism in question being vampire-ghost-fire-people, with hairstyles that were too ostentatious even for the 1980s, and outfits that make Bram Stoker’s Dracula look contemporary. Wouldn’t be that big of a problem, if not for the fact the ghost people become main characters (and one of them’s named Lucifer, because I guess tacitness is overrated), and if the firefights between normal people is like watching video game NPCs fight, then watching the vampires do anything is like watching someone use god mode, someone stands near them and they just spontaneously have a heart attack and die, might as well go take a piss any time you see them appear, because you’re not going to miss anything of value, nothing interesting will happen. They’re not the only one, there’s some bloke who looks like some Lidl version of Golgo 13, and they put in cyborgs somewhere along the line, and some woman who absolutely insists on not wearing clothes, which was a very strange creative decision, with how hollow the plot is, and how lifeless all but a few action scenes are, you’d think this was targeted at children since they’re the only people they can bank on being stupid enough not to notice how bad it all is.
No need for further miscellanea, the main issue with this shit is just how plainly the story moves along, nothing interesting ever happens, the story’s a bungled “political thriller” in which the grandiose political conspiracy doesn’t make any actual sense (we want to commit terrorism to weaken Japan’s economic power so that it can be used to store nuclear waste, and we absolutely have to store it in Japan because idk lol), the dialogue is downright schizophrenic, with people going on unrelated monologues with zero provocation, sometimes it feels like the actors accidentally learned their lines for the wrong script, watching Angel Cop is like constipation, the process is very painful, and the end result is just a big load of shit you’ll want to get rid of immediately.
