Golgo 13: The Professional

Posted May 22, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

Golgo 13 is a cold-blooded professional assassin who usually is hired to make sure the world gets rid of some of the worst people that live on our planet. After his latest job, where he had to kill the son of a big industrialist, Golgo suddenly finds him being hunted down by a seemingly endless army of people including FBI agents, the army and even horrific murderers and convicts. While performing his usual duties of killing people for money, he goes out to find who’s got it in for him…

Sound and Vision:
This anime dates from 1983 and is the first to have CGI integrated. However, the CGI is exactly where things go wrong. While most of the footage is decent manga drawings, the computer generated stuff looks awful and like a very first version of Flight Simulator. The rest of the image quality is decent though.

The 5.1 sound (doubt it’s Dolby Digital as otherwise it would be stated on the box) does a decent job although you shouldn’t expect too much. We’re already happy with clear dialogues this time

Extras:
None

Conclusion:
Golgo 13 is a nice anime that has a high level of “film noir” atmosphere combined with James Bond gadgets. Unfortunately the main storyline isn’t strong enough to keep you interested for 90 minutes so several sub-plots have been added but it’s too obvious. Instead of watching a movie, it looks like we get a couple of seperate episodes of an animated TV series that are puzzled together. As such that isn’t a bad thing per se, but the slow pace and often switching sceneries tend to bore after a while and the incredibly bad CGI only makes things worse.

Definitely something true manga/anime-lovers will want to have in their collection but for the general public it isn’t a classic.

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