Gangsta. Anime Review

Roller Coaster Crash

Roller coasters are noted for having a series of steep inclines that carts climb or slide down of, among other designed patterns. Gangsta has one such incline sitting near its end, and it’s a very steep one that takes the audience from what initially comes off as a very promising and intriguing crime drama storyline at the top, to a super power action schlock at the bottom. If you’d like to jump into the “straight up G” train, feel free to read on.

Episode 1 Review

Some say that the most important line in a book is the opening line, since it sets up the mood for the sort of story it is — or something like that. Gangsta does pretty much this by showing a pimp beating up one of his working girls while a sword-wielding deaf man reads a book. We get the gist of what kind of place the town is initially not through obtrusive exposition, of which this show does have loads of, but by following the daily activities of the blond, one-eyed Worick Arcangelo and his deaf partner Nicolas Brown.

The show follows the escapades of these two so-called Handymen, who take jobs that range from delivering packages to such characters as an old lady at her tobacco shop, to beating, shooting, and slicing thugs for whoever is willing to pay the bill — even the police.

The city of Ergastulum seems like an odd mix between old-timey New York and Rio de Janeiro.

The city of Ergastulum, where the show takes place, seems like an odd mix between The Godfather‘s old-timey New York and certain shots from Elite Squad‘s Rio de Janeiro; the backdrop gives the idea of a town that has grown despite being surrounded by walls, as a result giving it a somewhat chaotic geography with main streets being crisscrossed by back alleyways that can take you to unsavory places. This plays well with the idea of a city originally founded as a sort of dumping site for the undesirables left behind the wake of a war long past. This point is further accentuated by its governing body being comprised of three mafia families and a guild that supplies them, and other residents, with “special mercenaries” — we’ll get into that later on. The icing on the cake is the police force, which seemingly acts according to what the families tell them instead of a more “traditional” government.

Back to our main clique. They’ve been contacted by Chad Adkins, a “high-ranking police officer” for a hit job. The target is Barry Abbot, a hotshot with his own crime organization that’s been growing and proving to be a nuisance. The task is pretty much killing him, his entourage, and at least one of the prostitutes working under him; this prostitute being Alex, the one from the first scene.

Nic and Worick intercept them in a back alleyways and quickly dispose of him and his bodyguards. Just before the pair are done piling the bodies for the police’s disposal, Alex walks in on them and sees Barry’s corpse. In a fit of rage she grabs one of the pistols on the ground and shoots at the body repeatedly, then walks away in tears; Nic starts walking towards her to finish the job but is stopped by Worick, who takes her to Chad to let him know they’re taking her as that job’s trophy along with the payment for the hit job. In the last scene we see Alex again sitting below the window waiting for clients, but this time around Worick asks her if she can tend to the phone while he’s gone, thus kind of officially hiring her as part of their Handymen group.

You might wonder why I chose to give the first episode a section of its own. The reason is that its main purpose is to set up what from then on becomes the main duo+one (kind of like a trio but not really): Worick, Nicolas, and Alex. While not being wholly original, it manages to paint characters that seem intriguing enough in an interesting setting in such a way that it warrants further watching; not only that but it also feels like a complete story on its own in such way that it could be considered a “standalone,” with the rest of the show using it (at least to some extent) as a foundation. The problem is that the more it goes on, Gangsta loses this level of polish and planning, with the animation quality being an obvious example of that, even though it wasn’t something that impressive to begin with.

Episodes 2-3 Review

In this episodes a little girl named Nina, who works in doctor Theo’s clinic as a nurse, goes to hire the Handymen to take care of a group of thugs that want to force the doctor to side with the gang that hired them. Through Alex, who’ll pretty much be playing the role of the “fish out of water” from here on out, we learn about those “special mercenaries” previously mentioned. These are called “Twilights” but their moniker is “tags” because they’re always carrying a pair of dog tags with their class stamped on it. These kind of mercs have augmented physical abilities depending on what class they are, but since they’re not what you’d call “normal” they require a drug called Celebrer to keep them from not dying. Another not so neat thing is that “tags” have a much shorter lifespan than “normals,” with an average lifespan of 30-35.

Nicolas goes to Theo’s and gets into a fight with the head of the thugs, during which we find out that Nic’s ranked pretty high among Twilights. Once everything is settled, there’s a dark scene where the guy beaten gets chewed by his boss and is quickly dispatched by a couple of shadowy figures at his service. These two characters will later on be, if not central to the plot, at least very important.

In the third episode the animation starts showing some of its rougher features that will sooner than later become a mainstay. This one is spent developing Worick and Nicolas through, again, explaining to Alex how things are in Ergastulum. To not spoil it in case the reader decides to watch it, I’ll speak as little as possible about it, since their past and their relationship is a pretty important plot point for the show. Suffice to say, for now, that there’s a 22 year old unsolved case about a big mafia family that was slaughtered by one of their hired “guns,” except for the son.

In short, this is a delivery job with Nicolas going to different spots in the city with Alex tagging along, all the while Worick practices the world’s oldest profession with a classy lady.

Another issue that begins to show its face is Alex herself. It’s not uncommon to have a character that serves as the audience’s representative, whom we use to learn about that story’s world and its inhabitants, but more often than not this person takes the role of the protagonist or deuteragonist, this way making him or her an interesting figure to follow; because chances are that if you need someone around to explain things to the audience, this guy is going to be on screen a lot, and if listening is practically the only activity he or she engages in then this individual is going to get really dull real fast.

Episodes 4-5 Review

Chad, the police officer from the first episode, hauled the Handymen duo to the precinct for interrogation. The purpose isn’t really to see if they’re the culprits of a body-dump found in District 6, where all the victims were chopped into pieces, but to ask Worick to check the files for this case to help identify the remains. Worick has a condition called “hyperthymesia,” which consists of an individual being able to recall their past in extreme detail; in other words, if he’s seen your face he’ll remember it.

Once Worick is done, Chad gets a call from Danny Monroe, one of the mafia heads that act as pillars of the city, to tell him to send the Handymen to a gunfight he needs a hand with. Turns out that they’re part of a gang that plan to get rid of the Monroe and Cristiano mafia families, but the purpose for that is not clear yet. While Worick cleans up the small fry, Nicolas engages Doug, a high level Twilight targeting Monroe.

In the fifth episode the animation quality takes another dive, this time it’s very apparent because a big part of it are action sequences. News reach the Paulklee Guild (another of the “pillars of Ergastulum,” along with the Corsica, Monroe and Cristiano families), and due to the circumstances Gina Paulklee, the leader of the Guild, and Ginger, her sidekick and lover, have to interrupt them and fill both Nicolas and Doug with drugs called downers to force them to stop.

The altercation is used as a chance to look into the duo’s life and Ergastulum through info snippets found in the dialogue. We learn about the “Three Laws” for Twilights, which are heavily based on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but for super soldier junkies instead of robots. Another thing briefly mentioned is Veronica, a female tag that seems to mean a lot to Nicolas that’s now in very poor shape due to repeatedly overdosing on Celebrer.

This ends with Alex waking up with money on her hand, implying that she’s been “working the streets” while unconscious, plus being plagued by Barry’s hallucination for some time now, believing that he’s back to mock and abuse her. Only this time he’s opened the door to the Handymen’s office.

A way which this show uses to develop Nicolas and Worick’s past and relationship is through flashbacks of two kids: Wallace Arcangelo, the young son of the Arcangelo family, constantly beaten by his paranoid father; and his bodyguard, a deaf boy treated like a dog by his boss and father. Some people might dislike the back-and-forth that goes on with these time jumps, but I think this displays a level of planning that I like quite a bit, and up to this point they add more value to the story than what they could detract due to breaking up continuity.

Episodes 6-7 Review

Like many other shows, it’s around this point where the “main bad guy,” or at least the one that seems to fill that role, makes some sort of appearance. This time around it’s one of Daniel Monroe’s subordinates that’s meeting with someone that seems to be the head of the Corsica family to discuss the “evil plan,” which basically consists of taking over all the city. Usually the purpose isn’t clear by now, but it’s somewhat amazing how this show just straight up tells you: The Corsica family really hates Twilights. Whether there’s a “tragic past” involving “junkie super soldiers” and the Corsicas to justify it, or it’s another case of discrimination, isn’t addressed.

Once Doug and Nicolas have been patched up by Nina, Worick heads back to the office and finds a semi-zoned out Alex acting on the fear ingrained on her by Barry, her former pimp, and the “after-effects” of the drugs he had been giving her. This is probably one of the better directed scenes in the show, where the touching moments feel more human than in many romantic series (for example, the entirety of Plastic Memories) because of the issues and struggles the characters have been facing.

In Dr. Theo’s clinic he and Chad have a conversation about the autopsies the Doctor performed on the corpses found on the District 6 case, where all of the victims turned out to be Twilights “in the prime of life.” This throws even more suspicion at the Corsica family, but seeing that even high level Twilights were bested makes things confusing since they only accept “normals” in their ranks.

This is addressed in a meeting of the capos, where a heated argument between Loretta Cristiano and Uranos Corsica is stopped by Daniel Monroe’s proposition that there might be another unknown player.

This is an okay way of keeping the audience guessing who’s responsible, because at this point we know only Twilights could kill other Twilights in such a manner, and on previous episodes everything was on the Corsica family being at fault, but the discrepancies make things not add up. More doubt is cast on that possibility with the scenes of the platinum blonde girl wielding a sword with a mad kid in tow that seem to be going around town killing tags and taking their…well, tags.

While this is a fun way to go about things, this strongly depends on there being practically nothing more dangerous than a top ranking super merc juiced up in Celebrer. This is an issue that will be apparent further down the story.

Episodes 8-9 Review

Up until now I’ve been fairly positive with my opinions on Gangsta. So far the plot has been moving its pieces rather well, even if these have not been what some would consider “very original.” But this is the point where stakes get higher and higher and you begin to wonder if the show, after all its bluffing and posing, really has a winning hand or an Anna Kournikova at best. These couple of episodes, I believe, start the deep, deep immersion into the “wow, what am I watching?” zone, and that is very rarely a good place to be in.

This is the point where the stakes get higher, and you wonder if the show really has a winning hand.

Here the Handymen + Alex are doing some repair work at a gun shop owned by a girl named Connie, who’s the granddaughter of the old lady that owns the tobacco shop. After Alex carries a toolbox for a few seconds she takes a break and is hit by the memories of having a little brother while having a cup of tea with Connie.

At night the Handymen work for the Cristianos as a sort armed escort for the guests in the “soiree” held by the family, while Alex is “asked” to sing at the club where the party is being held. This is another of the better directed scenes in the anime, with it cutting from showing off Alex doing what she likes to do, to the Handymen fighting their way through the streets, along with a “swarthy young man with killer looks” hearing her voice outside of the club but not being allowed to get in.

This particular part of the eighth episode is especially memorable because it’s still not bad, I’d even say good. But Gangsta has now pulled the last bluff trying to appear bigger than it is. Now the descent has begun with the swarthy guy showing up in the same episode that Alex mentioned having a little brother. Some would ask “but why?” The reason is that everything up to now had been constructed through mentioning something, then calling back to it, plus Worick’s flashbacks of his childhood; but now that dynamic is pushed aside in favor of using what feels like pre-constructed blocks of plot, and when a show that’s low on originality that has kept me interested, not with pieces that it has, but by how it plays with them, and then it chooses to move those pieces in boring and predictable ways, I begin to lose interest really fast.

The ninth episode, along with another dive in animation quality, starts with one of the guests trying to kill Loretta. This triggers a brawl that gets out of control and, skipping a lot of details, it ends with an OD’ed Nicolas nearly killed by Erica the cute blonde fencer.

This episode leaves with a few “shockers.” First off we learn why Nico is so prone to chewing up more happy pills than normally advisable: that’s because his really high level is actually a result of overdosing and beating others that would otherwise be stronger than him; in reality he would probably be ranked higher than average, but only barely. The other shockers are that Mr. Swarthy Guy is Alex’s little brother but all grown up, and another is that blondie turned out to be the missing sister of one of Daniel Monroe’s closest underlings, Delico. So we now have two long lost siblings that come back but “evil” (or at least with the bad guys) for the price of one.

While the first twist I can take and probably even come to like, in due time, with the others it feels so unoriginal and excessive that it makes one wonder if the author was running out of ideas in the planning stage but decided it didn’t matter and penned the story anyway. Whatever the case, those two are not the most egregious details. Above I mentioned that Corsica shirking the blame depended on there not being anything stronger than a Twilight. Well, the one that takes the cake is that, after all, Twilights aren’t the ultimate human-shaped destruction machines. Turns out there are superhuman “normals” that have all the strengths of Twilights but none of the weaknesses. One could ask “but why is pulling this card so late in the game such a bad thing?” Because during all past episodes there were no mentions, at least not that I picked up, of anything superhuman but tags. The show goes so far as to say something along the lines of “only tags could be able to kill tags like this” in the District 6 case. But nope!

Episodes 10-12 Review

The characters’ current state of affairs prove to be less than ideal, with Loretta staying with the Handymen after the last incident, her subordinates — along with Nicolas — under Dr. Theo’s care, Alex having another meltdown, and the Guild being under attack by a clique of “superhuman normals.”

Compared to other anime that are blends of crime drama and over-the-top action, Gangsta falls short in every aspect.

These haven’t been badly directed episodes, even with the poor animation quality, but as I said before, what started as something that felt like a crime drama show with some action has transformed into an action show with some crime drama sprinkled over it — which is frankly less fun to watch. One could say that everything had been pointing up to something like this, since tags are a central part of the story, and they wouldn’t be wrong; but compared to other shows like Gungrave and the first season of Darker than Black, which were also blends of crime drama with lots of over-the-top action, Gangsta falls short in every aspect.

With the final episode there’s not a whole lot to say about what happens. Again it’s very well directed, and some of the character interactions manage to be engaging, but there’s very little “meat” here. Other than some action sequences that weren’t all that bad, there’s a scene of the old lady blaming one of Loretta’s henchmen because of her granddaughter’s disappearance.

This episode reminds me of Hollywood’s current trend when it comes to big-budget book-to-film adaptations: Take the book, doesn’t matter how short it might be, and try to make as many movies as possible from it. The problem is that while in this analogy the audience already knows there are other movies coming, in Gangsta‘s case it seems like the studio forgot that this was the last episode with no other season on the horizon, thus leaving a lot of plot threads simply dangling with the wind, unconnected and/or unexplained, along with a wide open ending.

I’m not saying open endings are an issue. Take Berserk for example, the anime ended at the climax, and the story wasn’t going to reach higher levels anytime soon after that. In the 12th episode of Gangsta, unlike Berserk’s 25th, things didn’t seem to be quite there just yet. Where the show leaves us is with Worick bleeding from a stab wound on his stomach, lying on the grass below a tree after being thrown out of a second floor window; Nic jumping around town thinking “bad stuff happens when it rains”, and Daniel Monroe following his treacherous subordinate to see “the big guy.” While this sounds like a good point to leave things be (temporarily), it’s a far cry from the summit reached in Berserk’s Eclipse.

There are a few more things I want to say about Gangsta, such as how even though I was disappointed with this show I don’t think it’s a bad one; that this feels like an inappropriate moment for an adaptation of what seems to be a major arc that’s yet to be finished; that despite all its faults and shortcomings, it also has facets and aspects deserving of appreciation. But even if one tries to somehow quantify the good and the bad parts it has, and come with a representative number for how “good” it is, no matter how subjective it might really be, the problem is that, in the end, it’s an incomplete story. And because of, or perhaps in spite of this, Gangsta ends up giving a semblance of mediocrity.

What Do You Think?

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