One Piece the live-action series is owned by Netflix
Directed by Emma Sullivan
The last episode of this show was the first one to feel the strain of fitting an anime story arc into a relatively small package, but even with it feeling overstuffed and unfocused it still succeeded due to the charm of its cast and the attention to detail in bringing the cartoon world of One Piece to life. Now that the stage has been thoroughly set, will this episode pay it all off in a satisfying fashion? Let’s find out!!
With the beloved butler Klahadore (Alexander Maniatis) being revealed as the bloodthirsty pirate Kuro of the Black Cat Pirates, it’s up to the Straw Hat crew (Iñaki Godoy, Emily Rudd, and Mackenyu) to try and stop him and his two co-conspirators (Bianca Oosthuizen and Albert Pretorius) from killing Kaya and stealing her family’s fortune! Then again, Zoro got thrown into a well and Luffy ate himself into a poisoned-food coma, so maybe it’s up to Usopp (Jacob Romero Gibson) to save the day in real life instead of just in his made-up stories of heroism and adventure. Will Kuro’s grand scheme come to fruition even with this last-minute hiccup in his plan? Can Koby (Morgan Davies) and the Marines come to their aid against such an obvious foe, or will their pursuit of Luffy leave them oblivious to the threat standing in front of them? Is it just me, or does every show eventually do a Die Hard episode?
This doesn’t fix everything about the last episode and in fact, exacerbates a few of its flaws, but there are some satisfying payoffs as well as a few great action scenes that round out its clunky moments. It’s trying to do a lot with what little time it has and it just proves to be too much as the mechanics of the plot end up outweighing the importance of the character arcs. No one gets this worse than Usopp who continues to feel secondary in a story that is ostensibly his. I don’t remember much about how this played out in the anime, but I distinctly remember him having to take ownership of his lies and suffer some serious consequences for it. Here, there’s only a faint whisper of such an arc as the show also has to make progress on the Marines plot as well. He doesn’t have a proper comeuppance because despite the town thinking he’s crying wolf he gets an immediate ally in the form of Coby who believes him and does what he can to help which propels Coby’s character as someone genuinely kind, but this leaves Usopp without an arc and his declaration to protect Kaya doesn’t reflect any growth in his character. What also felt like a bit of a drag were the Zoro scenes which accomplish their goal of giving us his backstory but I didn’t find it to be particularly compelling in execution. His story as a young swordsman just felt a little too clichéd and only slightly less so than the framing device of him trying to get out of a well. If Batman’s done this gimmick more than once, it might be worth coming up with a slightly different angle, but even if we ignore the clichés, it also feels pulled back as if they are intentionally holding out some key details for later reveals. We still don’t know why Zoro specifically hunts pirates, even with this tragic backstory we’re given, and considering he ended up there because of sinister pirates, it feels like the perfect time to have explained that. Still, it’s hard to stay mad at an episode that turns into a Die Hard riff where you’ve got a baddy fighting in a cape while another is fending off blows with a mop. The second half of the episode delivers on all the pirate action they’ve been holding off on for the last two episodes and the wait was almost worth it. The two Black Cat Pirate flunkies turn out to be quite adept fights when they get a chance to square up and fight back, and while Kuro’s plan is somewhat underwhelming given his supposed cunning, he does a great job as the stalking predator; complete with Freddy Kruger gloves and an acerbic wit. He also has a great fight scene with Luffy which goes further into one of the more interesting conflicts that our hero has to confront. He says he’s a pirate, but time and time again he refuses to count himself among his peers; seeing Captains like Kuro, Buggy, and even Alvida as menaces to be stopped rather than allies to court. The thing is, it’s not like these pirates are bad examples of the profession as Luffy’s the one barging into their space and demanding they turn back against their evil ways, and Kuro manages to get a rise out of him by pointing out this contradiction. I really hope that the show dives deeper and deeper into this conflict as Luffy being a pirate always seemed like a bad joke. Perhaps the anime addresses this thoroughly in a few of its bajillion episodes, but it’s nice to see it put front and center at such an early episode. I would not have tried to do as much as they did in these two episodes, but if they were crunched for time then at least they gave us a satisfying payoff. The Straw Hat crew is coming together, and even if we still need a little more work with Usopp since he didn’t get much to do here, I’m at least glad that we can move forward and hopefully find a more focused adventure next time.
The Reviewers Unite 