Now airing on Netflix
Director: Adam Wingard
Starring: Nat Wolff, Lakeith Stanfield, Margaret Qualley
The genesis of the plot at the heart of Death Note is pretty interesting. Light (Wolff) is a teenager dealing with many of the clichéd trappings of high school. He’s being raised by a single parent. He watches the attractive girl, Mia (Qualley), from afar, so afar he’s shocked when she knows his name. He tries to stand up to a bully and winds up beaten and in detention for it. He’s like a pre-bite Peter Parker, but without all the studiousness. Light comes into ownership of a book called, predictably, Death Note. Death Note allows Light to kill anyone he wants, as long as he can provide Death Note, or more specifically, its demonic proxy named Ryuk (Willem Dafoe) with a correct name while picturing the person’s face. It’s dumb, but it’s interesting.
Light does what, presumably, many of us might do. He tries to use Death Note for good, despite Ryuk’s knowing, giggling taunts. Light clearly isn’t the first do-gooder this malevolent prankster has seen try to wield Death Note, and you get the feeling he won’t be the last. Light creates the god-like alter ego Kira and kills hundreds of what he perceives to be bad people around the world. People begin worshipping Kira.
Instead of spending any real time reflecting on the ramifications of godlike power or what it really means to take a life, Death Note then turns into a cat-and-mouse game, as the enigmatic genius detective known as L (Stanfield) attempts to hunt down Kira. How L deduces things is never really made clear, but judging by his attire, he’s a modern Sherlock Holmes who’s really afraid of catching a cold.
Stanfield is always excellent, and in this case, that proves to be true even when he’s playing what turns out to be a pretty terrible character. Despite Stanfield’s best efforts, L is poorly developed, quirky for the sake of being quirky (he likes candy and sits on chairs weirdly!), and is just kind of there to impede Light.
The pretty girl we mentioned earlier, Mia, helps Light create Kira. They form a predictable relationship, and she winds up being a bright spot in the movie. Margaret Qualley may simply be carrying on her disaffected malcontent character from The Leftovers, but it’s certainly something she’s got down pat. She’s a natural fit for the role, and probably the best casting choice of the film. There’s a hardness to Mia that’s necessary for her character arc, and Qualley’s performance is key to that.
When Death Note was released, the most frequent thing you heard was about Willem Dafoe’s portrayal of Ryuk, but Ryuk is better fodder for a movie poster than actual screen time. He looks thrown together from old costumes. Perhaps one of the “monsters” from The Village, but with a Green Goblin mask on. The final product is pretty silly, and Dafoe really doesn’t have much to do besides giggle ominously. I can’t imagine he spent more than a half-day in mo-cap for this film.
It all makes for a film that manages to hold your attention without ever really being interesting. Adam Wingard is a talented director, and here he proves he can make a stylish, tolerable film even when the writing and story decisions aren’t particularly good. In Wingard’s excellent 2014 thriller The Guest, he makes good use of music to set the mood, and he does so again in Death Note. Chicago’s “I Don’t Wanna Live Without Your Love” stands out. While the film may not be remembered years from now, its use of that song might be, even if it seems to owe itself a bit, tonally, to Deadpool. It’s a fun moment.
I haven’t read the Manga on which Death Note is based, so I don’t know how true to the original story it is, but I am still bothered by the direction they went with the plot. Instead of really exploring what that power does to Light’s soul, it simply asks us to root for him while he toys with human life in efforts to evade capture and keep his god powers. At a certain point, you just start rooting for the authorities. After all, what did Light do to deserve this gift? The answer is nothing, and perhaps that’s Ryuk’s real punchline. At some point, some owner of Death Note will set their sights on destroying the real villain of the story – that prancing hedgehog with the glowing eyes who feeds the killing urges within the book’s owners. When they do, let me know, because that will be a far more interesting film than this one.
Is it Watchlist-worthy? Nope.