AllMovie

Hard Luck Hero was originally intended to be a music video for the popular Japanese boy band V6, and even at a brisk 76 minutes, in the hands of skilled veteran writer/director Sabu, it's clear that there's really not enough substance here for a feature film. The story is contrived and silly. The bandmembers are relative lightweights, and aside from an appealing comic turn from Junichi Okada, none of them register strongly as actors, at least for non-fans. It doesn't help that none of them is playing a character with much depth, or even a well-defined character type. The one thing the film has going for it, aside from a disappointingly brief appearance from Susumu Terajima as a yakuza henchman, is Sabu's typically darkly and flashy comic style. His temporal playfulness, returning to the scene of the kickboxing match repeatedly and showing it from the perspective of the three pairs of characters, is clever, but he doesn't reveal enough new detail with each pass, and by the third go-round, the material has gotten pretty stale. But Sabu knows how to stage a chase sequence with colorful pop aplomb, and he has a certain knack for darkly comic riffs, as when a police captain with bad aim guns down innocent bystanders one by one. Hard Luck Hero will certainly appeal to fans of V6, who, at least in Japan, are legion, and fans of the filmmaker will find he's left his indelible mark on the material. Beyond its appeal to those fans, it's a sporadically fun but shallow and forgettable actioner that simply doesn't draw the viewer in the way it should.