Review of Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom

In my review of Noir, an earlier work by the same director, I mentioned how the action genre is usually more limited with its characterisation in comparison to other genres, and in Noir, I considered that to be harmful to my enjoyment, as the characters were rather boring. Phantom: Requiem of the Phantom, which I’m just going to be shortening to Phantom for convenience’s sake, had the very opposite problem – where Noir made very little attempt, Phantom made many, bungled attempts, but the problem is though so much of this action series is diverted away from the action and to these characters, but theyreally shouldn’t have. These people are so lacking in any kind of flair that they shouldn’t have bothered, there's so much filler here they could make a Scotch egg out of it.

With that introduction out of the way, I’d like to talk about the one thing they got right and that is the action. People move fluidly, like they’re in an actual firefight, the cinematography's varied, and it's got a professional quality to it. Not to mention, though our main characters are obviously much more talented than the disposable henchmen they face off against, it is within reasonable parameters, they are not overpowered. And, in one scene, we even get a more realistic than usual depiction of a .44 – missing the first shot, and having the second one jam. Unfortunately, this reasonable quality orchestration of action sequences, alongside the equally good animation quality is just about the only positive I can come up with, and speaking of orchestration, let’s talk about the soundtrack. For what conceivable reason did they decide to make their recurring theme song a generic hip hop beat? This isn’t South Central, our main character is not being played by Ice Cube, it is entirely out of place, and it really crops up far too much for my liking. The rest of them aren’t much better, there’s a little variety when it comes to genre, Noir’s choirs are back, but qualitatively it is all equally poor, for the whole soundtrack sounds like it was ripped right off a stock music library.

The story, how can I forget that? Because it’s entirely forgettable, but I’ll try my best, some evil organisation has kidnapped our main character, named Ein, who is being trained to become a killer at the hands of Zwei, and for someone whose memory (but not moral compass) was wiped and forced into a very dangerous, and unpaid, line of work, he seems pretty chill about it, but whatever, there’s the two of them, and also they’re under control of Scythe, a doctor with a strange love of his ‘creations’. It begins as a very similar story to Noir, two killers, except this time around one of them’s a bloke, who kill people, because that’s what they do, and it begins fine, an action anime with a main character trying to ‘find his identity’ and shit, but the problem is, the more plot elements, characters, factions, and everything else they try and pack on, the more compounded it becomes, and the weaker it is. Phantom is at its best when the viewer knows the least about the characters in front of them, and at its worst when those characters are giving monologues detailing plainly how they feel about the given situation, as the dialogue simply is not engaging, and had they maintained a small cast, this could’ve been average, but for what starts as an action series, by the second half it really thins out with any sort of action, save the finale. By the end, we meet Drei, a girl that Ein finds, who quotes Dirty Harry and Travis Bickle once or twice, so she’s automatically mildly better than everyone else, until Ein is forced to abandon her, and a timeskip happens, causing a lot of character development (also, physical development) in the form of “I get sadistic pleasure out of killing and I hate you now and I will kill everyone and especially you but I am emotionally weak and recognise the fact I am coping and will break down crying at the slightest confrontation by you”, in other words, a bad character.

When it comes down to it, Phantom is not a very strong experience, the action sequences are directed well enough, but an action sequence is just like a gun, it’s made up of various interconnected parts, and they all need to be properly refined, or else the whole thing isn’t going to do a very good job, and unfortunately, this is where Phantom falls apart, if it was barren in plot, it wouldn’t be that bad, but the author is insistent on telling me more and more about things and people I progressively care less and less about, resulting in a rather mediocre experience.