‘Iké Boys’ (review)

It’s hard to review Iké Boys without addressing the elephant in the room: that it’s a movie steeped in Japanese culture, made by Americans from an American point of view.

The good thing is that it tries to tackle that head on, and has points to make about engaging with other cultures on a surface level.

Unfortunately, those points start getting drowned out as the film goes on, not only by a busy, effects-laden second half, but also by more generic messages about friendship and being true to oneself.

Shawn (Quinn Lord, Trick ‘r’ Treat) and Vik (Ronak Gandhi, All Rise) are two nerds living in Oklahoma during the final days of 1999. Both of them are otaku obsessed with Japanese culture, or more accurately, what’s available to them at the dawn of the internet era in rural America.

And they’re both a little too excited about Vik’s family hosting Miki (Christina Higa, Am I OK?), a Japanese exchange student, for the holidays.

It’s when Miki arrives when Iké Boys seems to be headed into regrettable territory, but to the movie’s credit, writers Eric McEver (who also directed) and Jeff Hammer give her a little more to do than simply be the object of nerdy affection.

Miki, it turns out, chose to study in Oklahoma due to her own overriding interest in Native American culture. But like Shawn and Vik, who try to impress her by showing off all their otaku stuff, Miki’s a little problematic herself – not knowing the difference between Indian people and Native Americans, she asked to stay with the Kapoor family.

All of this could certainly be a springboard to deeper examinations of cross-cultural relations, but Iké Boys’ main plot centers on a lost anime that Shawn finds and shows to Vik and Miki. The movie’s prologue explains that the anime’s director, Daisuke Ogata, had a prophecy of impending doom at the end of the millennium, and turned it into a film in order to warn the public. But the film bombed, and a warehouse fire almost destroyed the last surviving print.

When the movie simply stops before ending, the three kids are hit by a weird energy blast from the television. Shawn starts to transform into a mecha and Vik slowly evolves into a kaiju – which complicates their friendship, as characters repeatedly point out how mecha fight kaiju.

Complicating things further is Vik’s crush on classmate Bethany (Saylor Bell), who makes it a point to drive a wedge between him and Shawn. This would be typical for a coming of age teen comedy, if not for an early line of dialogue that confirms he’s fetishizing her based on her Asian heritage. That aspect, for better or worse, is never mentioned again after that one utterance.

Iké Boys is certainly not short on affection, for its characters, for Japan, and for the movies it homages. Shawn’s strained relationship with his father is touching, thanks in large part to a welcome turn from Farscape star Ben Browder as the dad. Shawn doesn’t seem to lack for father figures, as the prize student to his karate sensei Newt (Billy Zane).

Newt comes across as an older version of Shawn at first, similarly enamored of Japan, almost to the total oversight of his own Indigenous roots. He’s also married to Reiko, excellently portrayed by Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla‘s Yumiko Shaku. Shaku’s casting is one of the more overt nods to tokusatsu, but she’s a wonderful actress, so I can’t fault it. And like Newt with Shawn, Reiko starts to take Miki under her own wing.

But as the teen drama and fantasy elements of the movie become more pronounced, it starts to take its tokusatsu references at face value, just as its characters do. As Shawn and Vik discover their powers, they’re pitted against each other by shadowy doomsday cultists out to awaken the Old Gods, while Miki ends up going on an actual vision quest to figure out her place in the world.

Iké Boys ultimately takes the safe route, using monsters, mecha and magic as broad metaphors for growing up. The final act pays homage to kaiju movies and superheroes through a mix of practical effects, lower-tier CGI and animation. Though the effort is appreciated, the execution is a touch underwhelming. The final battle, however, finally finds the right note of old-school tokusatsu wonder.

Still, it’s sad that the movie settles for bland, warm nostalgia when it could actually probe deeper into cultural appropriation. Iké Boys is cute, and better than the trailer suggests, but it’s a disappointingly shallow look back at that time in fandom.

Iké Boys arrives On Demand and Digital HD on October 11, 2022

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Produced by Jeff Hammer, Brion Hambel ,Paul Jensen
Written by Eric McEver, Jeff Hammer
Directed by Eric McEver 
Starring Quinn Lord, Ronak Gandhi, Christina Higa,
Billy Zane, Yumiko Shaku,  Ben Browder