Every once in a while, some producer gets the bright idea to turn anime or manga into a live-action thing. There’s a certain logic to it – anime and manga often deal in super beings; the supers genre is potentially more profitable than any other. So. hey, why not?
Except the vast majority of these anime/manga translation to western film are –to put it kindly- failures. Not just Ant-Man Quantumania failures, I’m taking Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern failures. The kind you want to hide in closet somewhere. Knights of the Zodiac is one of these films.
The premise here is that Athena (yes, that Athena, the goddess of “wisdom”) has been reborn and some rando street punk has been assigned as her protector. None of this has been told to the rando in advance, so naturally he grows up to dominate the local MMA circuit. Seiya (Mackenyu. Hold up, The lead actor has one name? What are you, 18? What do you say to a one-named actor barely old enough to vote? “Good luck in your World Cup match?”) gets punked in the ring by his guru/master/frenemy –I’m sorry, how does the betting work when somebody not on the card immediately joins the fight?- And next thing you know, Seiya meets Sean Bean in an alleyway.
Oh, and Sean Bean doesn’t play Zeus in this film, even though the Greek Zodiac is clearly invoked. Does Sean
Bean die? Of course; it’s Sean Bean.
This is, unfortunately, about as far as I got before the film became a confusing mess of powerfights and powerpouts. Sean Bean died on schedule. Athena (Madison Iseman) turned out to be a teen Karen and Famke Janssen showed up to be evil. At the end of the day, I couldn’t tell you either why she and guys wanted to kill Athena, nor why our “hero” wanted to save the Teen Vogue goddess. But it all involved a number of secret locations, so there’s that.
Knights of the Zodiac had a lot of pointless action. I “liked” the introductory MMA fights better than any of the CGI battles, which kinda blows cuz I’m no fan of MMA. While not evil, this film is as sadly forgettable as what I ate for breakfast two months ago. There just isn’t anything to this picture that would compel one to return for any reason. At the end of the day, I can explain why this film was made; what I can’t explain is why it was released.
The protector was just a punk into underground pratfalls
Suddenly his life needed to answer to elevated calls
When guarding the goddess of wise
Here’s a tip on which I advise:
Make sure they don’t have you by the dragonballs
Rated PG-13, 112 Minutes
Director: Tomasz Baginski
Writer: Josh Campbell, Matt Steucken, Kiel Murray
Genre: It doesn’t matter
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The director’s mom, maybe
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Anybody who has already seen a failed live-action anime
