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3rd grade teacher Ichikawa (Sho Aikawa) is an underdog who has neither the
respect of his studnts nor of his family, where his wife fools around with
other men, his 15-year old daughter dates a Yakuza & his son Kazuki detests
him because all the other kids hate him for being a teacher's son. So, in his
sparetime, Ichikawa dreams about being Zebraman, a superhero from a 1970's
TV-show.
Ichikawa's mood is lifted however when a transfer student, wheelchair-bound
Shinpei Asano is sent to his class ... & the boy proves to be a fan of
Zebraman, too. So one night, Ichikawa hits the streets in a self-made Zebraman
costume, just to show it Shinpei, but instead he gets involved with a masked
maniac who was about to commit a sex-crime, & the 2 battle ... & during the
battle it turns out Zebraman/Ichikawa really has superpowers ... but for Segawa
& Oikawa, the 2 incompetent agents from the defence agency investigating
the case, it also turns out that the maniac was actually an alien invader ...
In Shinpei, who triggered his super-heroism, & his widowed mother
Ichikawa soon finds a substitute-family he prefers to his own & he starts
spending more & more time with them while fighting more alien invaders as
Zebraman. Soon though it turns out that Shinpei might have something to do with
the invasion (this subplot though is eventually dropped), that the aliens
invade by possessing people by means of a green slime (don't ask), & all of
this slime seems to have its origin under the school Ichikawa works at. &
what's worse, even Kazuki, Ichikawa's real son, is eventually possessed by the
alien slime - his Zebraman father does save him though.
After the principal of the school falls victim to the aliens too, Zebraman,
Shinpei & his mother do some investigating about the man's backbground
& find out that he is actually a benevolent alien who wrote the
Zebraman tv-shows back in the 70's in order to warn mankind of thwe invasion
& has predicted everything so far quite accurately ... But what about the
unfilmed episodes, including the grand finale ?
Zebraman finds out that he will be killed by the alien queen, simply because
he cannot fly - but, as the principal once said if you really believe in it
it will come true. From now on Zebraman practices flying, but with painful
results, as he doesn't manage to convince himself that he can fly ...
In the final fight - that comes way too soon for our hero - all seems lost
when the alien queen proves to be a storey-high being made of green slime, able
to transform at will & shoot laserbeams. It is only when paralized Shinpei
shows that he can stand up if he really believes that Zebraman realizes everything
is possible ... & takes off, fighiting the alien queen with everything he's
got, & even turning into a winged zebra at one stage (though I'm not quite
sure how this will improve his fighting abilities).
I think you won't have any trouble guessing who will win in the end so I
stop my synopsis here.
It's hard not to find Japanese 1970's live action superhero tv-shows (from Kamen
Rider down) at least somehow charming & funny.
This hommage to the
genre by Takashi Miike doesn't work quite at all though as it neither manages
to stay really true to the source (which might have been weird anyways) nor
infuse the story with some clever second thought - instead it's just another
story of an underdog rising to grandesse when need arises (which is a worn
cliché since at least the original Spiderman-comics from 1961,
though it might reach back much further), blended with some fashionable but
meaningless conspiracy-theory-story that is told in a way too sketchy manner to really grip
the audience, making this movie - despite the great title & our hero's
campy outfit - a big disappointment.
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