Writer: Toshimichi Suzuki
Director(s): Takemasa Ikegami, Hidehito Ueda, Akira Nishimori
Year: 1990
I should like AD Police, but I don’t. Not that I dislike it, it’s just… not quite right. Looking, sounding, smelling, feeling right at home amongst other sci-fi anime of my youth, very dark, bleak and gratuitously sexual.
The DVD is a collection of 3 OVAs which, from what I gather, prequels to A.D. Police: Dead End City and Bubblegum Crisis.
The series takes place in Mega Tokyo, which is the same setting as Bubblegum Crisis. I am not familiar with Bubblegum Crisis, but I gather that it has a narrative focusing on a group of all-female vigilantes, while AD Police is a series of one-off stories connected loosely by the fact they involve the AD Police. The AD Police are the elite-force that deal with runaway Voomers (also called Boomers), which are essentially female robots which have gone mad for whatever reason. This manifests itself in grade A crazy shit, generally killing people, causing mayhem, and being sexually provocative. Mega Tokyo seems to be the classic sci-fi dystopian cyber-metropolis, filled with cyborgs, psychos, bastards and bitches. The city is absolutely teeming with them, and so is the series.
Therein lies the problem. There are no likable characters. There is nothing to grab onto. The very layout of the series is disconnected, and this just adds to the chaotic, frenetic pace of the stories. The AD Police themselves are made up of dick-swinging yahoos (male and female), and even the new recruit who is introduced in the first episode quickly falls into step and starts swinging away. Every woman in the series, excluding one wide-eyed and naïve officer in episode 2, is a bombshell and violent.
The first episode shows an AD Police group trying to take down a rogue voomer. One officer fires a couple of shots at her, which clearly has no effect. He declares:
“Bullets won’t stop her!”
And receives the reply:
“We’ll see, take this, bitch!” and then the officer, a beefcake, tries to strangle the robot. By the end of the scene he is dead. They are an elite force, you see. Also, it has nothing to do with the point I was making, but the owner of this first voomer is a very racist representation of Chinese guy, which isn’t allowed. Sorry, ishant arrawwed.
The first thing you see of the AD Police is their tank roaring down a packed street gratuitously wiping out civilian cars. This wasn’t played for laughs, nor was it meant as a satire of police brutality, I’m fairly certain you’re meant to empathise and root for the AD Police. It is quite difficult when their banter includes such witticisms as:
“You okay rookie, you’re not gonna shit yourself?” which could work in the mouth of a particularly gung-ho character, but in the mouth of a dick-swinging yahoo it is just a dick-swingingly yahooish thing to say.
While English-voice acting of anime and games has improved in recent years, the low-budgets of past dubbing has given rise to some poor work, and I would put AD Police into that bracket. It isn’t so spectacularly bad to make it enjoyable, it is just misjudged. For instance, by the end of the episode, the rogue voomer is begging for death, which she does by whining “kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiill meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” in a feeble guff of breath.
The episode also dabbles in grim koolwank, where Gina, the female officer we are meant to care about gets angry and literally rips one of the voomer’s tits off. Literally, with her hand. Just reaches on up there and rips it off. As a wise man once said, sometimes the women are worse than the men.
The second episode opens with a 16 year old female prostitute being killed by a knife-wielding visor-wearing bitch. This series is dark and grim, by the way, just in case you hadn’t caught on.
It follows a plot which examines what drove the knife-killer to do knife-killings, which is, spoiler, because she’s been slowly trading her guts for robotic guts, and now she doesn’t feel like a woman anymore. So kill prostitutes, obviously. It is an interesting premise, but the shortness of the episode means it is rushed, and cheapened.
A police (regular not AD) officer is introduced in this episode, a young, naïve female police officer with a short bob and severe fringe, a cute, bright, cheerful idealist. I’m not saying the police force isn’t a safe haven for innocent, naïve idealists, I’m not well versed in law-enforcement. I’m just saying it seems a misfit, especially in Mega Tokyo, where half the city is destroyed on a daily basis by reckless police and psychotic robots.
The naïve police officer trails the crazy knife lady down an underground corridor, splashing through sewage ankle deep, the wide eyed young police woman declares:
"I wonder where I'm going, where will this tunnel lead me?"
and then she gets grabbed and a knife put to her throat. The last person who said “I wonder where I’m going” was no one, it didn’t happen. Lies.
When the knife-killer runs away, the policewoman faints. Because she is a girl. Her presence in the series is misjudged.
By the end of the episode, the knife killer is begging for death. See the pattern?
The third episode focuses on an ex-boxer turned AD Police turned dead, who is then turned into an experimental police cyborg with the sole purpose of killing the life out of crazy voomers. What could possibly go wrong?
At one point in this episode, an officer shows his surprise by declaring “Fuck me!”, which, while unrelated to my review, I enjoyed and thought should be mentioned.
The cyborg experiment goes well initially, Billy, the cyborg’s name, is really good at killings voomers. The problem is that he can no longer really experience anything. His nerve endings have been dulled, his skin removed to make way for his exoskeleton. He is left only with his tongue, which he bites in order to feel anything. This leads to very striking imagery of a psychotic tongue-lolling cyborg ripping up voomers. Powerful imagery, points scored.
Unfortunately they lose points by making the professor who developed Billy a Sexy-Ass Professor, which I believe is an important breakthrough area of science that was being developed in the 90s.
Billy becomes stricken with ennui, because he can’t feel, and starts getting drugged up by shooting drugs into his tongue. The professor tries to engage with him using other methods. To quote from my notes:
‘The gratuitously sexy-ass professor who made him tries to engage his senses by dressing in kinky lingerie and grinding all over his robot body, pressing her tits into his robot face.’
It ultimately doesn’t work, but I’m imagining that the scene gave a lot of teenagers some very confusing imagery to deal with. She was wearing kinky stockings and the rest of it underneath her lab coat, which I believe was very prescient, and is now standard uniform in all labs.
Billy eventually loses his shit spectacularly, crushing the professor’s head as she is grinding up on him, which is very bad form indeed. Gina, the AD Police officer who’s been recycled from episode 1, and apparently knew Billy when he was human, comes to investigate why he is acting so strange now he’s a robot. Again, from my notes:
‘Gina rushes in to find the sexy professor sitting in Billy's cyborg chair, head crushed and mouth-open The Ring-style, and declares:
"it had to end like this”.’ Which, of course, it didn’t.
She hunts Billy down, and even though he has murdered everyone in sight, she manages to kill him, even though he is a man-shaped tank. She succeeds because, here’s the pattern, he also wants to die, realising that being a tin-man is no way to live. He declares:
“Yes Gina, kill me, shoot me in the brain”.
Which is an unintentionally hilarious thing to say. Because of that third episode we are now all aware of the danger of building an indestructible drug-fueled killing machine.
Unfortunately, I started this review with the conclusion, which is quite bad form, so I will re-iterate as though that was my plan all along. It is so hard to empathise with any of the characters, they are so heartless and unforgiving, as is the location and the scenarios, it is very difficult to engage with.
The first episode ends with a monologue from the rookie, who describes Mega Tokyo as a “savage, soulless city”, and when that is the case you end up with a largely savage, soulless story.
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