Year released: 2005
THE CHARGE: Animal cruelty. Anyone who would doom a cute little koala to a life of living in cubicles is a dirty monster.
THE EVIDENCE: In this Japanese import, a successful executive is accused of murdering his missing girlfriend. He has no alibi and no memory of the night of her disappearance, but the chain of events is eerily similar to what happened when his wife was killed years ago in a crime that was never solved. He also happens to be a koala. An executive koala, in case you wouldn't have guessed that from the title.
Japan has a well deserved reputation of putting just about anything on film and I've seen my fair share of weird movies from that country like Ichi the Killer, Happiness of the Katakuris, Tokyo Gore Police and Big Man Japan, just to name a few. Executive Koala is not even close to being the weirdest, but that's probably why I found it so disappointing.
Much of the humor in Executive Koala stems from the blatant silliness of the main character being dressed in a giant koala suit while everyone else in the film is normal. Everyone, that is, except the koala's boss, who's a giant bunny. And there's a convenience store clerk who's a frog. But at least there's an explanation provided near the end of the film as to why the lead had to be a koala. I have no idea what was up with the bunny and the frog. Maybe someone spent too much time on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in Disneyworld Japan.
It's like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meets Glengarry Glen Ross.
Not content with the contrasting characters, the film also delves into contrasting styles. It starts off as a murder mystery, turns into a slasher film, takes a left turn where it becomes a musical, settles in for a while as a prison exploitation flick and then caps everything off with a kung-fu ending. Clearly, we in the United States are not getting the really good stuff being wrapped into sushi rolls across the Pacific.
What these divergent genres really suggest is that director Minoru Kawasaki had no confidence in the strength of the film’s central concept to carry an entire movie. And he was right. As strange as it sounds, Executive Koala is actually rather dull. All the humor is visual while the story is driven almost entirely by dialogue. As the koala is being questioned by police and anguishes over his girlfriend's disappearance, the only joke is "ha ha, he's a koala". It's funny for about a minute, but this flick is almost 90 minutes long. It eventually becomes agonizingly interminable, like listening to a five-year-old recap the latest episode of Spongebob Squarepants. (Yes, we get it, Squidward’s cranky, can we please move on now?)
Your drunken monkey style is no match for my incarcerated koala!
Though Kawasaki tries to save the movie with his constantly shifting film styles, it seems less like a gag and more like a “throw everything into the soup pot and see what happens” approach. Ultimately, it doesn’t work. By the end, Executive Koala reminded me of most Saturday Night Live skits that have been turned to feature films: funny in small doses but not interesting enough to hold my attention for more than a few minutes.
THE VERDICT: Executive Koala is GUILTY of beating a dead horse with its one-joke premise and would be sentenced to bamboo shoots under the fingernails if it just wasn't so goshdarned cute.
