Review of Death Note (2017) by Fernando C — 13 Sep 2017

Having never watched the anime it's based on, I will judge Death Note as a stand alone film. It's not good. Let's start at the beginning, Light Turner, played by Natt Wolff has a 'death note' mysteriously dropped into his lap and is visited by a creature named Ryuk, voiced by Willem Dafoe, who tells him that if he writes a name in the book, that person will die.

After a rash of mysterious deaths people start to grow suspicious and Light's identity is sought out by a detective known as 'L' who wants him to pay for his crimes. There are fundamental writing and directorial issues with this film, the dialogue is extremely cheesy and expository from the onset and Nat Wolff's acting is so over the top and cartoon-like it's hard to take anything he says or does seriously.

The characters have almost no story arc and no motivation for a lot of their actions, Light turns from a supposedly wimpy, nice kid to a murderous sociopath who gets off on killing in a blink of an eye for no reason.

Mia, played by Margaret Qualley, fairs a little better as her character does progress and change throughout the film but again there is no catalyst for this change. The most interesting parts of this film are short violent scenes of the deaths that resemble Final Destination in their strangeness but unfortunately are not as well done.

The one little ray of light, no pun intended, is Ryuk, Ryuk's appearance and voice are well done and he is certainly the most interesting character in the film. However he isn't given very much to do, most of his dialogue is expository and he isn't given nearly enough screen time for his character to be fully fleshed out.

Overall, American film has somewhat of a history of remaking Japanese properties and completely ruining them, unfortunately Death Note is no exception. Now I would like to watch the original anime to see what everyone's raving about.