I first saw the poster to this movie while I was in Singapore few months ago as they were placed in various strategic areas. I noticed it was scheduled to be playing in July. Then I saw in the "coming soon" section in Indonesia's cinemas websites and my wife and I who are fans of Detective Conan, could not wait to see the movie. But when it finally premiered on 24 July, we were away and could only see this film yesterday. Anyway let us get on with the movie.
Brief Story Line
This time the movie was set mainly in Singapore, where a person was mysteriously murdered in the famous Marina Bay Sands hotel. Ran (Wakana Yamazaki) with her father Kogoro (Rikiya Koyama) and her best friend Sonoko (Naoko Matsui) went to Singapore to see the Karate championship where the main reward was a belt with the legendary jewel called Blue Sapphire. With such famous item, it certainly attracted the attention of the notorious thief Kaito kid (Kappei Yamaguchi).
Meanwhile Conan somehow managed to be in Singapore, which might as well be as he could help to solve the murder case.
So what would happen to all of them and what kind of danger they would be facing now? Find them all in this fun Detective Conan story.
End of Brief Story Line
This movie was quite similar to the previous 3 Detective Conan movies that I saw, whereby the formula was a major case happening earlier, Conan and his friends would somehow be involved with their silliness and ended with spectacular action sequence finale. This time the case did not take the center stage as the story seemed to be focusing quite a lot on the "love story" angle which was actually quite fun. My wife and I and a lot of the audience in the theater were enjoying ourselves as could be heard from the multiple times I heard the laughter or at least chuckles.
Aside from the love part, there were also the usual surprising twists in Conan series but the case itself was not really complicated and what I liked the most about this film was the tempo was not really rushed. It felt just nice and I did not feel I must keep up with the whole movie to avoid feeling "loss" and could not understand the whole story. The plot was easy enough to understand and it did not make me tired after watching the film despite having a duration of 110 minutes including closing credits. There were quite a lot of nice pictures of Singapore scenery that were used as base for drawing the animations during the closing credit, and it has an interesting post end credit scene that also gave us hint of the next Conan movie in 2020.
I mentioned above that the story was set in Singapore and showed us lots of its tourist spots (which would explain the huge promotion it did in Singapore). As my wife and I really loved the country, this movie felt even more entertaining for us due to our familiarity with the various places shown. But one thing we thought was lacking was the use of English dialogues in the movie which were supposedly said by Singaporeans, unfortunately the movie maker did not use real Singaporeans to dub them, and as a result, their accent was not too convincing. If you have been to Singapore lots of time (or you have Singaporean friend/family/acquaintance) you would know about their specific English accent called Singlish. One more thing that I noticed was the sound effects this time was just perfect, it did not feel too loud and I enjoyed it a lot.
As fans of Detective Conan series, my wife and I enjoyed this movie a lot because we got to see Conan solving case, using his various gadgets to save his loved ones and the appearance of his kindergarten friends (though they only appeared briefly), plus of course Sonoko's crush to a young man and obviously Kogoro's craziness. And that was the critical factor. This movie can definitely be enjoyed by fans but not necessarily by the ones who are not familiar with the series. It would be very hard for them to enjoy this because the characters were quite a lot and the feeling of attachment would not be there for non-fans. Therefore, it is wiser to just watch the TV series or read the manga comics first to at least be familiar with the characters and style before seeing this movie.
Overall I personally felt this to be a more entertaining movie in the Conan movie series if I compared to Detective Conan: Zero the Enforcer or Detective Conan: Crimson Love Letter. Oh before I forgot, this was the 23rd movie which was a pretty amazing feat, and it is not going to stop yet. So if you are fans of Detective Conan, seeing this movie would be a must. Hopefully you would enjoy it as much as we did.
Happy watching!
Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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