Rating: 7.5 of 10
Yukio "Koyuki" Tanaka's (Takeru Sato) was an ordinary—somewhat a loser — high school student but his life soon changed when he met Ryusuke Minami (Hiro Mizushima), a fellow teenager determined to build a band and make it in the rock world. Beck, also the name of the band (after Ryusuke's dog), follows the band’s story and their rise to fame.
Beck is a live action adaptation of a critically acclaimed and highly popular manga and anime series of the same name. In case you pay attention to the actor's name above, I won't lie that partly the reason I'm interested in it was because it also had Takeru Sato who I loved in Rurouni Kenshin. The other reason, was because my boyfriend recommended me the story many times but I had never made up my mind which version I'd go into first. The actor just tipped the scale a bit into the live action.
That said, while I thought Sato was cute as the shy Koyuki (and I definitely see proto-Kenshin in his character), I found the other actors inhabit their characters much more fully. Mizushima had his swagger dead-on as the charismatic but volatile guitarist Ryusuke (with almost perfect English, too), Osamu Mukai as the cool blooded bassist Taira, Aoi Nakamura as happy-go-lucky Saku, Kenta Kiritani as the unsheathed Chiba, and Shiori Kutsuna as the somewhat-annoyed-but-supportive sister Maho. And from the images I saw, they actually look a lot like their manga and anime counterparts too, which is always a big bonus. They also have incredible chemistry with each other, and immediately felt like brothers from the get go.
The first part of the film felt a little bit clunky as it tries to accommodate both Koyuki's and Ryusuke's sides of life, but immediately gelled after the band formed. It really was a delight to see the band coming and playing together, and it wasn't only because of their chemistry but also because their music was genuinely good (especially for movies). The storyline could be more focused as it tries to fit in various subplots, as is often the case with a lot of adaptation from serialized material, but that is pretty minor.
But the biggest mistake, in my opinion, is having KOYUKI NOT SING AT ALL. Koyuki was billed as the one with angelic voice, capable of silencing thousands of people with awe in their shows, but the movie actually muted him out focusing instead on the instruments. I understand the director's decision to make him not actually sing because whatever they showed might not be on par with what we imagine, but for me it was downright annoying. If you're not familiar with "Chekhov's gun" rule, it is basically a "rule" in storytelling in which, for example, if you introduce a gun in the first act, then by the third act you really should have made them go off. Don't make promises or teases something you can't keep. In my opinion Koyuki really is worse than Chekhov's gun! Especially once I found out that Sato actually did some singing in the past, but like that mattered anyway. They could've easily hire a proper singer to do the singing part if he were not up to par. The movie actually ended in a pretty satisfying climax with the band performing in front of a big crowd, but with Koyuki not singing it was quite hard to not feel at least a bit disappointed. This "little" detail is actually what brought the movie down from a possible 8.0 into a 7.5 for me.
TL;DR In conclusion, Beck is a pretty charming, pretty benign live adaptation —if you could get over from the absence of singing in Koyuki's part.