A young man comes to possess a supernatural notebook, the Death Note, that grants him the power to kill any person simply by writing down their name on the pages. He then decides to use the noteboo...
As an adaptation from the manga and anime, Death Note fails greatly to inspire the same charm and intrigue from its source material. It does not properly follow the source material, and definitely dumbs down the excellent intricacy and intelligence that made the anime so great. However, putting my fanboy disappointments aside, Death Note's biggest problem from a film perspective is it's screen time. I say this because the film feels greatly rushed, especially in the second act. It felt to me that the writing was quite sloppy, as they simply jumped to conclusions rather than arriving at plausible scenarios from well fleshed out investigative work, and concrete leads. Aside from that interesting plot points are introduced, but due to its short screen time and sloppy plot writing they're ended in a very unsatisfactory manner. I'm trying hard not to compare the movie to its anime counterpart, yet I must say that the character development in this film was poor, especially when compared to the anime/manga. For me this mostly concerns Light's character, as the brilliantly crafted complexity of his character is lost to a more young adult theme that completely doesn't work for me. The reason this falls so short for me is because of his love interest Mia, and I absolutely loathe this character and change to the story. The writers basically took Light's character development from the source material and attributed it to her own separate character, making her character feel simply unbelievable, as her intentions are kept too vague and unconvincing. One change that still falls short from the original, but is nevertheless entertaining is the character of James Turner. Did I prefer the source material of Light's father and family more?Yes! Did I still enjoy his father's character here? Well, yes. He manages to be probably the only change that I managed to still find decently entertaining and appealing. Sadly, who I expected to be the saving grace of this film from the trailer, namely the character of L also falls short. One of the great things from the source material was how great and smart L is at calculated deduction, but as I've said before due to the rushed nature of the film I did not for a second think that he could've possibly logically done some things in the film. Also his trademark chess like conversations with Light are pretty much ignored in this film, and this is also a greatly down to the fact that Light is not that great of a character here. In terms of his development, to an extent his motivations, and most of all his supposed intelligence are not defined well here in any way. This definitely leaves a huge void in which the new ideas can't fill. One thing a much touch is how pleased I am with some of the performances in this film. Even though I was displeased with his character overall , Keith Stanfield's performance as L is definitely not bad, as I did believe his motivations and emotions displayed in the film. Willem Dafoe as Ryuk was good, as it was pretty much the only thing they kept mostly constant from the source material. Sadly this movie honestly sucked for me, and anything I haven't mentioned in this review was probably something I didn't enjoy as well. Poor movie, and an even worse adaptation.
