by Cain Noble-Davies

Year:  2021

Director:  Kenji Nagasaki

Rated:  MA

Release:  2021

Distributor: Crunchyroll/Sony

Running time: 104 minutes

Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Daiki Yamashita, Nobuhiko Okamoto, Yuki Kaji, Tetsu Inada, Kenta Miyaki

Intro:
... generic and aimless.

If you have fond memories of the underrated superhero flick Sky High, then My Hero Academia [MHA] might be the series for you.

Brought to screens by the same studio behind both TV iterations of Fullmetal Alchemist, MHA has a knack for balancing bombastic and creative action sequences with the kind of characterisation that will make you empathise with the biggest of recurring villains.

It’s ‘Superhero High School: The Series’. Unfortunately, the films based on this franchise haven’t translated that appeal effectively to the big screen.

‘Noob-friendly’, there aren’t any sticking points in World Heroes’ Mission where the series lore becomes an impassable wall for anyone not already in the know… but that itself is part of the problem. The plot, and even the recognisable characters, are generic and aimless.

It starts out promisingly enough, with the introduction of the non-powered supremacists Humarize and their leader Flect Turn, who opens things with what must be this universe’s equivalent of the Fourteen Words, but it quickly peters out. The characters, Flect included, exist as extensions of the fight scenes, missing their own personalities, save for Izuku ‘Deku’ Midoriya as the pure idealist and otaku power fantasy.

That on its own would be fine, given that anime films aren’t allowed to be too plot-intensive, lest they mess up the plans for the main series, and at least the two previous films, Two Heroes and Heroes Rising, were able to deliver theatrical-release-worthy visuals. Not the case here, though. Aside from not having any clever combinations of powers (or Quirks, as they’re called in-universe), the ‘camera work’ never gives the audience time to take in everything that’s happening on-screen. This is something that only grows worse as the film goes on, to the point where the finale is basically a massive light show ripped right out of Dragonball Z; likely from one of its many filler episodes.

And speaking of filler, this is essentially a feature-length one-off episode of the show where the pacing doesn’t in any way warrant the run time. It starts with a lost briefcase plot that is made irrelevant, a tensionless ticking clock for the villain’s terrorist plot, and what’s in-between isn’t enough to make up for the bulk of this film just acting as loading screens for the too-frequently-incomprehensible fight scenes.

6Generic
score
6
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