8uppers – It’s Reservoir Dogs Meets 3 Men and a Baby Meets The Professional and Still Manages to Remain ‘Cute’

A rag tag group of cleaners unexpectedly ‘adopt’ a baby and search for the child’s mother. Unfortunately, adopting this baby isn’t as simple, especially when there’s a group of hired assassins wanting to kill the child.

A ragtag group of cleaners perform assassinations of top officials, business owners, and anyone else if given a decent reason to. They cover up their underground activities by running a night club in the slums of the city, but once the club closes, they put on their suits and do whatever it is requested for them to do; which is usually grabbing information and making certain corrupt individuals ” disappear “.

This scene with Ryo was hilarious.

One day, while on a watch, Mac (Yuu Yokoyama) and his two cohorts watch as a woman quickly puts a box out on the side of the road and leaves as quickly as she came. They come to the box and Jacky (Shingo Murakami) opens it up to find a baby, wrapped in nothing but a few blankets, inside and a envelope full of money to cover any initial expenses. Apprehensively, they bring the baby back to the club, appropriately named THE EIGHT, and the child is greeted by mix reactions from the other members. Johnny (Tadayoshi Ohkura) immediately takes the baby, as well as Gum (Ryuuhei Maruyama) and Toppo (Shota Yasuda), but Arsenal (Subaru Shibutani) and Ace (Ryo Nishikido) are completely against the idea of a baby. Mac decides that they’ll keep the child long enough to find it’s mother, both he and Jacky neutral on the entire situation.

"The Abbey Road" idea is so overly used, but it really worked here as a central theme.

The rest is the movie is about the relationship the seven have with the baby, who they name “Hachi” in honor of the bar that they reside at. At first, no one wants to watch over the child, but all decide to share duties and assign days for each member. So, Hachi follows them wherever they go, even on “jobs”, and the seven grow closer and closer to the child. Except for Arsenal and Ace who find the child to be more of a problem than a blessing for the group. Eventually, Ace comes over his frustrations with the child and then finally Arsenal — but suddenly the mother is found and they discover the reason why she gave her son up.

The group confront the child’s father, the son of the Prime Minister of Japan, who wanted to kill the baby because he had the child out of wedlock and it would be too much of a scandal. Mac presents the man with a knife and hands him his son, who he then orders to kill with his own hands since he wanted the child dead so badly. The politician crumbles under the pressure and the sight of his own son in his hands, and the seven assassins reluctantly give Hachi back to his mother, though, without taking one last “family photo” together.

What was that? I couldn't hear you over how awesome I am.

I hope I got everything right. Between fangirling, the kansai ben, and screencapping every other scene and fangirling them over tumblr, I wasn’t really paying much attention to the plot.

Anyway, the movie was surprisingly good. It’s not an OMG MASTERPIECE but for what its worth and the amount of time that it was put together, it was actually decent. I came into this movie expecting it to be a cheap gimmick. The last few things I’ve seen K8 act in, together as a group, have been last then wonderful. I still get vietnam flashbacks whenever I think of the KTV Winter Drama Special back in 2006 and while the mini movie included with Zukkoke Dai Dassou was cute and funny, you can’t tell me it wasn’t the cheesiest piece of … whatever. Also, given the acting prowless of half of K8, expecting Emmy award winning acting is like hoping the Miami Dolphins make it to the Super Bowl. It ain’t happening. But, 8Uppers (pronounced as Pacchi Uppers) was really good and it seemed like our boys matured enough to take it seriously enough to have it reflected in their performances.

Each character portrayed by Kanjani8 almost seems like a reflective insight of their “characters” within the group itself. Ryo is the cool guy, Subaru is the reserved one, Yoko is the leader, Hina is his second in charge, Maru is the mood maker, Yasu is the cute one, and Ohkura is the guy that’s just there. Its like Nakamura Teppei, when he wrote the movie, watched a few television appearance the group was on and expanded and exaggerated those qualities. No one in Kanjani8 had to act out of their comfort zones to make these quirky group of assassins work on screen. It was something that I’m kind of glad Nakamura did not put a gamble on. So if Ryo’s first scene is him walking on set shirtless with his pants barely hanging off of his ass with a cigarette in his mouth, at least you know it isn’t far from his personality in real life. Or if Yoko is just standing around, calmly giving orders and actually being rational and level headed, you know in the back of your mind that the real Yokoyama Yuu is actually that reserved guy.

fffffffffffffffffffffff 8U~ maru. remember, i fangirled u way before all the other ones!

My only gripe with this movie is the sound editing and mixing. The movie is basically set to the 8UPPERS album and each scene is basically set to the mood of the music, but sometimes the scene follows the music so well that when there’s a change of scene, the music also changes, and it disrupts the entire watching experience. This happened several times, either through quick fade outs or cut-tos which was pretty awkward at times, especially when you hear a nice ballad and directly cut straight to an faster pace song for an action scene. Now, on the other hand, there were scenes that were brilliantly edited – The one standing out the most being the fight between Mac/Gum/Jacky down in the parking garage while Ace was being taunted by children and Arsenal being bored with Toppo and Johnny’s shopping and giggling over cute baby clothes.

Speaking of action, I was really impressed with Maru in this movie more so than all the other members. His fight scenes seemed pretty authentic and flashy considering being a martial artist is not in his job description. The movie put emphasis on Ryo’s stature and size, a small guy with an attitude bigger than the world, but it was still awkward to see this skinny twig try to take on all these goonies… at least having Subaru there as a voice of reason helped ease the awkwardness of watching this guy. Subaru was pretty flash with the guns, but sometimes it looked like the guns were heavier than him and with his tiny frame it was kind of funny to watch at times with the way he was holding them. All the other members didn’t have “action” scenes and the action wasn’t dependent on them. Yoko was the leader and ordered people around, but he never got his hands dirty. Hina was quick with his hands, Yasu was good at pulling tricks, and Ohkura was too busy with his hands filled with a baby or a woman. But then again, Ohkura is a useless guy.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. It seemed like I was watching Oretachi wa Tenshi da in some scenes, especially with Yoko’s ordering, and like 3 Men and a Baby like others. In my inner mind I would love to have a sequel or maybe a mini series come out of this but then again, its always possible to wreck something that has something good going for it.

.. and if it isn’t broken don’t fix it.

A Happy Family. Now, Ovaries Exploding in 3... 2...