Shinichiro Ueda made history quite emphatically back in 2017 when his debut work “One Cut of the Dead” was released. The independent project with its cheap, off-the-wall filmmaking was made on a meagre $25,000 budget and opened in only 2 screens across Japan. By the time it finished its theatrical run, it had played in more than 250 screens nationwide, had earned more than a thousand times its budget in Japan alone and just as much internationally and had picked up several domestic and international awards along the way. It is, therefore, no surprise that his follow-up project “Special Actors” was looked forward to by fans with as much anticipation as skepticism, because to ask a director to follow a debut feature of such staggering success is a tall ask to begin with.
Special Actors is screening at Japan Cuts
Kazuto Ohno dreams of being an actor but he has one problem holding him back: he faints whenever he is stressed or confronted. A chance meeting with his estranged younger brother Hiroki introduces him to “Special Actors”, an agency that specialises in providing its clients actors for any occasions or to solve any problem they might have. Have a boyfriend you want to break up with, want mourners at a funeral, audience to laugh at a movie or difficult customers to test your employees? “Special Actors” are at your service for all of that and more, preparing detailed scenarios and providing actors to take care of your situations for a fee. When a schoolgirl hires the agency to save her sister and their family inn from the clutches of a religious cult, Kazuto reluctantly agrees to be a part of the plan to swindle the swindlers but soon is determined to prove to be Rescueman, his favourite b-grade superhero character, for the inn and its owner Rina, who has been brainwashed by the cult into handing her inn over to them.
Ueda's follows up the massively successful “One Cut of the Dead” with a film that may be a more traditionally structured narrative but is not any less funnier. Gone are all the meta twists of its predecessor, instead giving way to a straightforward storytelling that stays entertaining while still being an ode to the art of frantic filmmaking (or theater, to be specific) and the profession of acting. In trying to keep the comedy quotient and the number of twists and turns of the story high (a little too high for its own good), “Special Actors” suffers in character development but the humorous set-pieces, of which there are many and all too frequent, prove to be more than sufficient to keep the viewers hooked. It also manages to stay unpredictable for the most part, holding some cards close to its chest all the way down to its last scene.
Once again, Ueda selects a roster of amateur actors after an extensive acting workshop with them, developing the characters and script to their individual strengths. The pasty-faced Kazuto Osawa plays a version of himself as Kazuto, a performance whose clumsy awkwardness may take some getting used to but eventually endears itself to the audience. The rest of the cast is vast and varied and though the inexperience of some comes across, Hiroki Kono as Hiroki gets the most scope (and screen-time) and shines.
“Special Actors” also sees the return of Takeshi Sone to lens another Ueda feature. He doesn't nearly have as difficult task as their last collaboration this time round, but he still manages to take full advantage of the indoor locations, which are more often than not largely populated in most scenes. The setting of certain scenes, in terms of their locations and the actors' placings within them, often remind of the director's origins in theatre.
I suppose the biggest questions most people would have before going into “Special Actors” could be, “Is it as good as ‘One Cut of the Dead'?” or “Is the script as clever or as meta as Ueda's last solo effort?” While the answer to both these questions is a resounding “No”, such a comparison is a major disservice to this film. Works like “One Cut of the Dead” happen once in a lifetime, particularly in genres as saturated as comedy or the zombie sub-genre. But when you look at “Special Actors” by itself, it is still a very funny and entertaining feature that, despite its weak characterization, exposes the utter ridiculousness of religious cults and only goes to strengthen the director's hold on the genre.
