'Returner' eccentric grab bag of gimmicks

By Manohla Dargis
Los Angeles Times

•	'The Returner' R, for violence In Japanese, Cantonese and English, with English subtitles 118 minutes

Got that? It gets weirder. After the killer and teenager join forces, they trade wits, ammunition and stares with a second killer whose gangster bosses have trapped an extraterrestrial that looks exactly like ET but shriveled.

Cobbled together from a grab bag of influences, director Takashi Yama-

zaki's pastiche comes across as one of the nuttier expressions of film-geek love in recent memory. The story, which he whipped up with Kenya Hirata, fuses together a classic science-fiction scenario with a standard-issue thriller setup, then embroiders his pulp fusion with loads of filigree.

After the girl, Milly (Anne Suzuki), exits the future overrun by storm-trooping aliens, she steps into a present that initially looks like a "Matrix"-inspired showdown, only to mutate into something at once more grand and ridiculous. What emerges plays out like the weird love child of Ishiro Honda (the original "Godzilla" director), John Woo and Steven Spielberg, with a touch of visionary artist H.R. Giger tossed in.

"Returner" wears its influences — and rips them off — with the utmost sincerity. Like nearly everything else, the storm-trooping monsters wreaking havoc on the world of tomorrow are recycled from other sources, in this case Giger's oft-copied creature design for "Alien." How these nasty extrater-restrials got to Earth and why they're hopping mad doesn't make a lick of sense, but as soon as "Returner" opens, it's obvious that rationality is as inconsequential as originality.

Still, the cast takes the whole thing to another level.

As the sympathetic killer, the drop-dead beautiful Takeshi Kaneshiro injects feeling into an otherwise generic role. As the time-traveling teen, Suzuki widens her saucer eyes with Power Puff insouciance, while Goro Kishitani steals the movie as the film's heavy. From his electric-shock hair to his Rockabilly shoes, this super-freak scores with the villainous best.