Riding Bean

Before Kenichi Sonoda made his name with Gunsmith Cats, Yasuo Hasegawa directed the first episode of his story of a tough-as-nails Chicago courier named Bean Bandit. Sadly the series was never to be and all that saw the light of day was this, the single part OAV of Riding Bean.

Underworld deliveryman-for-hire Bean Bandit and his sidekick Rally Vincent are given the task of rescuing a girl from kidnappers and transporting her to safety in Bean’s notorious car the Road Buster. Unfortunately Bean and Vincent have been double-crossed by their would-be clients so run the risk of not only losing the cash but falling foul of the highway police and the kidnappers themselves.

If you’re looking for deep philosophy or heart-rending drama you might as well stop reading now. Riding Bean is an up-front action adventure and makes no pretence of being otherwise: it is chock-full of sharp dialogue and exhilarating car chases with little room for anything else but quite frankly that is all you need. The creators clearly had a love for the US and Chicago in particular with special attention given to the cityscapes and the cars themselves; it oozes a Hollywood cool that even many American shows fail to capture.

Bean Bandit is a surprisingly complex character who works on whatever side of the law pays most but lives strictly to his own moral code and is so over-the-top in the toughness stakes you can’t help but like him. Like Lupin the Third and Zenigata, Inspector Percy is the perfect foil to his streetwise adversary with his equally hammed-up obsession with taking the Road Buster down. Sadly the performances of the supporting cast are laughably wooden (it’s dub only, don’t forget), but the VAs for Bean and Vincent do a great job of capturing the nuances of their characters.

Needless to say, the gunplay and the car chases are the main event here and I’m pleased to report that the action scenes are brilliantly animated. It’s astounding to see the gear changes and corners shown with such style and panache; in a late 80s OAV no less! These scenes are gleefully overdone with the pile-ups of incompetent highway cops being strewn across the asphalt after their quarry leaves them quite literally in the dust.

The biggest downfall to Riding Bean is that there really isn’t enough of it: with a story as fast-paced as this the forty-five minutes pass in a flash. Being one of MVM’s earliest UK releases there isn’t much in the way of DVD extras either so the overall package feels a little thin. If however you’re out for some no-frills action with automotive mayhem that does the finale of the Blues Brothers proud, Riding Bean fits the bill perfectly.

In Summary

A short blast of high-speed thrills from the glory days of the OAV, Riding Bean is a simple-but effective tale of one cool guy in a seriously cool car. The running time and lack of original language dialogue may put off some but this is one feature that has aged well and can still deliver shallow but exciting entertainment.