Monday, June 12, 2017

Detective Conan: Crimson Love Letter - 21st installment of Detective Conan Series

As mentioned in my previous post about the movie Mine which I watched yesterday, I originally wanted to see only this movie after my weekend staycation. But since we had the time, we considered to have ourselves another movie marathon which we had not done for quite some time. The show was at 7 PM and when we checked in the website until 15 minutes before start, it showed that only 3 of people (including my wife and I) who were planning to see the movie. But as the movie almost began, few more people came to the studio and we ended up with around 10 people. Perhaps it was due to the fasting period as usually it was having more audience. Anyway, let us get on with the movie.

Brief Story Line


Story started with the murder of a champion of the Japanese Karuta card game with the culprit shown as black character like usually done in Detective Conan's comic books or TV series & movies. Later on, we were shown that Conan (Minami Takayama) and his kindergarten friends Ayumi, Mitsuhiko and Genta plus his high-school sweetheart Ran (Wakana Yamazaki) with her father the well-known detective Kogorō Mōri (Rikiya Koyama) were in a TV station. They were looking at the preparation of the Karuta championship with the main star Momiji Ooka who seemed set to become the next champion. Conan and friends were there as invitees of Kazuha (Yuko Miyamura) and of course Heiji (Ryo Horikawa), whom Kazuha had a huge crush on, and also one of the very few friends of Conan who knew about his actual condition and identity.

After a bomb threat to the TV station and due to some reasons, the year's Karuta championship was almost cancelled. However after careful considerations, the championship was continued, despite bomb threats still lurking. As usual, since the movie was a mystery, I would not reveal too much information in the story line to avoid possible spoilers.

So what was the reason for the bomb threats? What was the link between the murder case in the beginning and also those threats? Find them all as Conan and Heiji had to use their wits & intelligence and cooperate once again in order to close the case and also to prevent the major plots the culprit was planning.

End of Brief Story Line

Conan was actually one of my favorite manga comics that I had read quite a lot and I also enjoyed watching some of its anime series. I felt that the cases in the comic book or series or movies were intelligently done and were intriguing and revealed in rather fast paced but mostly quite easy to digest. However, when I saw this movie, I found it very challenging (if not difficult) to understand the plot of the movie in the middle part, especially when it involved the Karuta game which was a very unfamiliar thing for me. And furthermore, the movie had a feeling of having a rather roller coaster pace. At some moments the story was told in a very very fast mode and others were in normal mode. 

This time, the case was actually rather interesting and the cooperation between Conan and Heiji was nice to see. The funny moments involving Heiji and Kazuha, plus the kindergarten kids and also professor Agasa were brief but fun to see as well. Compared to Detective Conan: The Darkest Nightmare which was having a lot of actions, this movie was having lesser action sequence, but more analytical thoughts of the cases. The final conclusion where Conan and Heiji were able to solve the mystery was nicely done and surprisingly not difficult to understand as opposed to the investigations part in the middle.

Since the movie was having Heiji as his partner, Conan's superior intelligence was rather shared with Heiji who was also very good in solving cases. In fact at times both of them seemed to understand one another. Even Kogoro did not have too much screen time. By the way, this movie was having a post-credit scene which was fun to see and also explained the very small "mystery" about Heiji's childhood history, so be sure you wait till the very last moment. Oh one other thing that I was not able to understand was the title which did not seem to be having any relation with the movie (or maybe I missed it?).

So if you are a fan of Detective Conan, I am sure you would be able to enjoy this movie. The Detective Conan ingredients like the difficult case, the solving by Kogoro, the fun characters (even if they were shown briefly) are all there to see. The only challenge I found was as I said, the difficulty to understand the Karuta game, and the too fast pace in the middle part. My suggestion would be not to try to understand the game and just let it pass to enjoy the movie. If you are not a fan, and you have never read, or seen Detective Conan prior to this one, I would advise not to see the movie as it would be too difficult for you to enjoy, like the mother of 2 kids who was playing with her handphone throughout the first half hour of the movie until we told her it was disturbing. 

Happy watching!

Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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