Not content to legitimately borrow Shirow's Landmate mecha-suits, Gundress also takes a few pages from his other works, swiping building architecture from Dominion and a Fuchikoma-like sidekick from Ghost in the Shell. However, this doesn't prevent the script from pelting the viewer with shallow, unconvincing melodrama and tired subplots such as Marcia's inability to shoot a hostage-taking terrorist, which might make her the film's deepest character. Alissa and Jean-Luc aren't defined beyond their introductory motivations, and the members of Angel Arms are equally dull. Though the basic story isn't inescapably horrid, Gundress never grows past a wireframe of a plot. On the right, what's-his-face from Final Fantasy VII. Alissa, it seems, is a former terrorist herself, and the newly arrived villains are headed by her erstwhile lover, Jean-Luc Skinner, who looks rather familiar. The other members of Angel Arms regard her with a simultaneous measure of respect and concern, and the reason for this becomes clear when a pack of terrorists show up in Bayside City to assassinate Hassen. Much of Gundress, however, centers on the group's silver-haired combat commander, Alissa. Our heroines include the mercurial but vapid Silvia, the childish, annoying computer geek Michelle, the blandly serious Kei Yung (yes, an actual Korean character in an anime production), the blond-and-not-much-more LAPD emigrant Marcia, and the team's businesslike, personality-free leader, Takako. While the easygoing Hassen sits in a glass cell at the city's police department, we're formally introduced to the members of Angel Arms, which most resembles a Shirowian interpretation of the Bubblegum Crisis cast. (Sadly, this version of Angel Arms has nothing to do with the Neo Geo game Shock Troopers: Second Squad.) Over the course of a confusing and horribly animated shootout, the women gun down most of the criminals and arrest a weapons smuggler called Hassen. However, the trade is soon broken up by Angel Arms, an all-female SWAT team equipped with straight-out-of- Appleseed Landmate mecha. In a move that mimics Shirow's fondness for cyberpunk, Gundress takes us to the 21st-Century stretch of Bayside City, where the film's opening minutes reveal an illegal weapons deal at the docks. Why? Because Gundress might be the worst anime film of the last twenty years. It wastes even his limited contribution.īut Gundress is also different from the usual Shirow-disowned crap. Gundress, a 1999 film originally planned as a console RPG, is a similar creation, owing the look of its heroines and mecha to some Shirow sketches. Yet he also had the unfortunate habit of lending his artwork and ideas to terrible things like the Landlock OVAs and the PlayStation gun game Horned Owl. Many years before he grew incapable of drawing anything but incoherent trash or unnerving porn about slimy bronze women, the reclusive manga author created complex, engaging stuff like Dominion, Ghost in the Shell, and the delightfully insane Orion. Masamune Shirow is now a mostly irrelevant weirdo, but he had his day.
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