Final Draft review – could you do 3,240 sit-ups then have a lovely old chinwag?

The Guardian

3 days ago

In a giant TV studio somewhere in Japan, a retired baseball player and a former rugby star are 40 minutes into a competition to see who can do the most sit-ups. Lying with their feet hooked to the top of a steep, bright-pink slide that has long since become a river of sweat, they must respond to a buzzer every five seconds by hauling themselves up using just their abs and hitting a button with their foreheads. They've both done that more than 500 times – when someone eventually misses a rep, their feet detach and down they go.
If this were Squid Game, the slide would end with a lethal drop. But instead it's Final Draft, a wholesome and emotional Japanese reality sports contest for ex-sportspeople, so all that's at risk is the right to remain in the competition. As a long sequence of incredibly gruelling elimination showdowns whittles 25 contestants down to the one who will win ¥30m (about £150,000), Squid Game is an influence, but so are Gladiators and Ninja Warrior, as well as modern Netflix sports fests like Physical: 100 and Ultimate Beastmaster. Mature British viewers might think of 1970s BBC stalwart Superstars, the multi-event contest between athletes from different disciplines that briefly threatened to turn parallel bar dips into the UK's national sport.
Watching from outside the UK, the barrier to entry here is that, unless you're so keen on water polo, kabaddi, American football or ultimate Frisbee that you watch those sports' Japanese domestic leagues, you will have heard of very few of the contestants. Perhaps Japanese viewers won't be that familiar with them either, since the lineup mixes champions with those who never quite made it.
So who cares which of these ripped strangers will be the best at running up a mountain or traversing a monkey bar course? The endeavours in Final Draft are long grinds but the contestants are a happy, humble bunch and, watching them in adversity, we get to know and like them. Emerging personalities include gentle-natured bodybuilder Kenta Tsukamoto, and Hozumi Hasegawa, a wise, wiry boxer with three world-title belts. Olympic wrestler Eri Tosaka's determination and cunning makes her the most likely of the female contestants to defy the odds in a contest that has a few too many events based on pure physical strength.
The star, though, is retired baseball hitter Yoshio Itoi, who looks less like a sportsman and more like the singer in a revered art-pop band– with his high cheekbones, debonair grin and the sort of floppy hair most 43-year-olds don't have the looks to get away with. Yet he soon proves to be fearsomely strong. Think Bryan Ferry on creatine, or Brett Anderson if he could deadlift a speaker stack.
Final Draft needs alluring characters like Itoi-san, because there is a lot of time to fill. The season runs to an endurance-sapping six episodes, or enough time to perform 3,240 sit-ups: the events last for ever, and then in between the epic bouts of grunting and grappling, there's a lot of chat. The post-exertion interviews tend towards the bland, earnest and obvious: 'I was surprised,' people say after something happens that is to some extent unexpected. 'I was happy,' they report when an event goes well. The 10-second skip button is your friend as every eliminated contestant gives more or less the same speech about how much they respect their conquerors. To try to keep us entertained, the show employs every reality-contest trick it can think of, from splitting the gang into two groups with either luxury or basic accommodation, to allowing tearful Zoom calls with proud loved ones back home.
Eventually, it all leads us to what the show is really about, which is the quiet tragedy of the sportsperson whose career is over. Having had to stop doing the thing they loved due to age, injury or just not being good enough, none of these people have known what to do with their 30s and 40s, and have ended up running fledgling businesses that provide paltry incomes, or working low-level jobs with bosses who are younger than them. Over dinner, or in the panting aftermath of another painful stamina test, they bond over the sadness of dead dreams and regrets that their glory days weren't greater. That prize money would fund a precious new start.
So it does matter whether or not a guy with a sprained ankle can push a giant medicine ball up a slope, and the finale – a three-way tug of war, each labouring to drag themselves to victory, inch by agonising inch – is gripping despite being a much longer scene of grimacing sports personalities trying to pull each other over with ropes than you ever thought you could tolerate. Stick with Final Draft and your hard work is, eventually, rewarded.
Final Draft is on Netflix now.