Family man assassin
NETFLIX continues to build on its impressive licensed anime library with Sakamoto Days, an action comedy revolving around a retired
legendary assassin turned small convenience store owner and family man.
Once a feared figure in the Japanese underworld, Taro Sakamoto (Tomokazu Sugita) in the present operates a family-owned convenience store in a quiet part of Tokyo. After getting married and becoming a father, Sakamoto is unrecognisable from his days as a bachelor assassin, having gained an estimated 70kg in excess weight.
Sakamoto Days kicks off when Shin Asakura (Nobunaga Shimazaki), a clairvoyant hitman reluctantly locates him, with the order to either successfully convince Sakamoto to return to the underworld or if failing to do so, to snuff out the portly ex-assassin's life.
Based on Yuto Suzuki's manga series, Sakamoto Days bears a lot of similarities with other fictional works, especially recent ones such as the films Nobody and John Wick. What sets the animation apart is the Japanese eccentricities common in manga and anime, along with the story's heavy emphasis on the family unit.
There is also the comedy that comes from juxtaposing a stoic, mostly quiet character such as Sakamoto with the other more colourful and expressive characters, such as Asakura. As his clairvoyance is always 'turned on', he is constantly reading the minds of others and it gives a window for the series to inject humour by having Sakamoto think of hyper-violent things to shut Asakura up.
The series' action and art style are also commendable, with the latter being more stylistic than adhering to more typical Japanese animation. For a better idea of what this means, think of how different Studio Ghibli films look compared to say, Dragon Ball.
Unfortunately, the show has a minor flaw: as the first season keeps introducing new characters with each episode, Sakamoto's relationship with his wife Aoi and their daughter Hana gets slightly sidelined in terms of screentime.
The few scenes they share together, such as the flashback of Aoi giving Sakamoto an ultimatum to stop killing by threatening to jump off a building to show him the value of life, are great, but few and far in between.
Given the first season's finale involves the dangerous antagonist Slur helping four serial killers escape to hunt down Sakamoto, Aoi and Hana may get pushed out of the frame further in exchange for more action scenes in the second season.
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