You’re Under Arrest!: The Motion Picture

You’re Under Arrest!: The Motion Picture is a flawed but action packed ‘cop’ thriller, heavily influenced by the kind of high octane ‘car chase’ films often pumped out by Hollywood. As such, You’re Under Arrest! also suffers from this genres’ typical failings; wafer thin plot, ludicrous action pieces and ultimately, just all style over substance.

After completing their one year work experience period in a different Japanese police department, Miyuki and Natsumi are back on the beat with the Bokuto Traffic Corps.

The story kicks off during a routine round of arrests, when the Traffic Corps come across a mysterious computer disc; containing the kind of highly sensitive information which could lead to the very downfall of Tokyo.
Assuming the disc is safely stored, the last thing our law enforcing girls expect is to be attacked by terrorists at their very own police station – but alas, somebody obviously wants this information badly.

And so begins the rollercoaster ride of You’re Under Arrest!: The Motion Picture. It would be harsh to go so far as to call this bad, but it certainly is an underwhelming anime movie; suffering from a cast of bland (and terribly cliché) characters and a poorly executed buddy-cop plot-line.

I found myself especially uninterested in You’re Under Arrest!’s two main characters, Miyuki and Natsumi. Other than being a bunch of extremely good police officers, I found nothing compelling or of interest in their personalities. They are never conflicted and come across as being a nice bunch of gals’– problem is; ‘nice’ is often boring too.

It’s a shame, because when it’s not dealing with a bunch of squeaky clean police officers, the story is actually quite intriguing and provides us with a cool few moments of action (a group of terrorists successfully siege a police station).

Like-wise, there is a commendable love of cars evident in the movie’s animation. Everything from ignition points to hub-caps are animated to realistic specifications, implying a real passion for the modern auto-mobile (and lordy, there are a number of cool car-chases too).

If only this sense of realism had been transferred to the action scenes; machine guns are fired at point blank range but not a bullet hits its target””and even on the rare occasion that a bullet does hit someone, there is no blood to be found.
I found this kind of skewed reality left the film feeling slightly unbalanced – an entire bridge in (down town) Tokyo is blown apart, but as far as we know; there are no victims. This is where I started to think the film has no intention to tell a proper story, happy to revel in the sheer style of destruction – but ignoring its consequences.
I wish we could have learnt more about the terrorist organisation, and seen our heroes, just once hit a brick wall, but then maybe I’m hoping for too much from a movie spin-off of a popular anime TV series.

In Summary

You’re Under Arrest!: The Motion Picture, despite showing early promise as an intriguing police drama, fell completely flat thanks to an uninspired and boring group of characters.

Fans of ‘action-anime’ can (and should) find a lot better than this, a movie that should be considered as a feature strictly for fans of the You’re Under Arrest! series only.