Detective Conan M22: Zero the Enforcer

"The blades of both good and evil that I have brandished soon turn around and slash me."
- Zero by Masaharu Fukuyama

Meitantei Conan: Zero no Shikkonin (2018) is one of the newer additions to the massively popular Detective Conan franchise, telling the tale of the dark side of law enforcement. Series I've really liked such as Phoenix Wright 5: Dual Destinies as well as Miles Edgeworth Investigations 2: Prosecutor's path for example have tackled this type of subject matter, and this time it's one of my all time favourites, the Detective Conan series, to do the same. Considering how the Justice system has been presented so far in the franchise, I honestly never thought we'd get a movie like this one.

The plot of the movie is multilayered and even somewhat complex due to characters reading ahead of others one after another; this is definitely one that requires either intense attention or another rewatch, which is something I appreciate from cinematic films, these Conan movies are always packed in content. The second half of the movie deals mostly with action and reveals.

The Story

The Sandwich man

Edge of the Ocean is a soon-to-be-opened seaside city near Tokyo Bay that is practically a small island. With a variety of facilities on the island ranging from a Casino Tower, that works as a
lighthouse, to an international convention center and shopping mall with classic japanese aura as its design concept, this seaside city is hyped by the news as both the next big tourist attraction that can even easily be entered with a two-sided monorail as well as hyped as the place for the next big summit meeting of Japan's elite that will put active 22 000 Japanese police officers on the Meropolitan area (who knew Megure had that many colleagues in the PD?).

The movie kicks right into high gear as the convention center, in which the summit was planned to have been held in, completely explodes, destroying the surrounding city blocks. In the midst of the flames Amuro Tooru, also known by his real name Furuya Rei, one of my favourite characters and one of the main attractions of this particular movie, can be seen looking at the blazing structure as the movie's opening scene starts playing.

Fly!

Kazami Yuya is a new character introduced as a cast for this movie. As the police make their assumptions about how the explosion could have been an accident as the core area of ignition, in other words the kitchen area of the convention centre, was detected to have filled with gas, meaning it was an accidental gas explosion, and if it was a terrorist attack, it would make no sense to do the explosion one week before the summit meeting, due to the heightening of security.

Kazami Yuya of the MPD's Public Security Bureau arrives to the Police Department in the middle of a meeting, as he's all tattered up from unexplained damage, and explains that a high-voltage cable might have caused the ignition of the gas, because the PSB had found fingerprints burned onto the voltage cable's storage unit. The fingerprints were confirmed to have belonged to an ex-police officer, the now famous sleeping Kogoro. The story quickly heads to a direction where Kogoro gets handcuffed and taken to jail for questioning as more evidence against him is found; he then becomes accused of murder and of causing a terrorist attack, and the one prosecuting Kogoro is a famous prosecutor known for never losing a case (his fame is equal to Eri's), named Kusakabe Makoto.

Despite Eri - who is lawyer herself but her close connection to Kogoro doesn't allow her to defend the man - trying to find a defense attorney for Kogoro, no one seems to agree to take the case. At that moment a new character, Tachibana Kyoko, a 29-year-old attorney who hasn't won a single case appears and says that she wants to defend the Sleeping Kogoro. However, something about her is weird as she almost seems as if she wants Kogoro to get prosecuted.

Brainstorming

The main plot of the movie revolves around the explosion of the international convention center that
took the lives of some of the Public Security Bureau's officers, and Mouri Kogoro is getting the blame for it. The story handles heavy new subjects to the series such as cyber crimes and the dark side of the Public Security and the court in which they just try to put the blaim on others; these illegal acts from the 'Justice's'/law enforcement's side actually do seriously happen in reality, and Amuro is in the center of it all.

This movie is substance over all else, mostly. It's filled with intense amounts of information and foreshadowing; a suicide in a past case, showcasing Agasa's drone that can be controlled in a 30 kilometer radius, to the news mentioning about a re-entering space shuttle with a GPS unit in it, to making the watcher question why exactly Amuro was there at the scene of the explosion? and why was Conan's second phone (his 'Conan' instead of 'Shinichi' self's) phone on the ground? and so on.

Regarding the target audience of the movie - think of all of these characters that they just don't even try to introduce - Kogoro, Eri, Kuroda, and so on, and think of the plotlines, why Haibara acts ominous when she sees Amuro and what the whole complex deal behind Amuro is in the first place, why does he seem both the hero and an antagonist? these are things that new audience will be completely left out off, not even counting the complex plot of the movie itself.

 

Zero the Enforcer is clearly made for Conan fans and not anyone else - it's intended for the ones who can instantly recognize who a character is and what their affiliations and relationships with the other cast are. I honestly feel that it is impossible for non-fans to just drop into this movie and enjoy it fully as it is, even if you enjoy and can keep up with high-paced stories that constantly introduce something new to weave the story with.

I am an Amuro fan right after I am a Heiji fan (M21 was my favourite movie in the series so far). But even leaving that bias out, in a sense the film itself is an impressive piece of work that I definitely enjoyed watching due to the amount of friendly complexity it can offer to the watcher - on a rewatch when I paid attention to the smallest of details in the writing, that's when it really shined to me. I can enjoy it when things can contain more than one layer to them - an explosion cannot have been a terrorist attack because the security of the summit will be tightened. That's what the police assumed, but there are more than one side to that conclusion.

Conclusion

The True Madman

So, there is a surprisingly intense amount of information in the film to be gathered in the film but it tones down about an hour and fifteen minutes in as it gets right into the action and conclusion parts. All these different organization groups and individual characters in the backgrounds that move the story forward make the entire thing surprisingly grand in scale. The hints towards the culprit were pretty clever in this one because it directly connects with what kind of person they are, and the order of events. I did not guess the hint, but I did guess the culprit from another scene, but was not 100% sure until the reveal.

The action scenes in the movie are quite amazing if you are a fan of Amuro and him driving like a nutjob. I really liked this movie, not because it had crazy hand-to-hand combat or anything, but how fitting and badass the action was to the characters themselves. Amazing. Ahh, also, despite the serious tone of the movie, there was also slight comedy - right in the beginning I got a chuckle from Conan thinking that Dr. Agasa's new drone invention, that can be controlled with satellite signals, is breaking countless different laws" as well as the moment when Tachibana Kyoko says she's lost all her defense attorney cases was pretty funny. The use of soundtracks was above average and fitting as well and I really love how much meaning the lyrics of the ending credit song, Zero by Masaharu Fukuyama, has with Amuro's character and this movie.  

Overall, Zero the Enforcer was a great, great film for the hardcore fans, with a lot backing it up when you start to pull it apart. It had content for hours despite being a little less than a two-hour film. Ah, also it's nice to see a lot of Amuro content, as our favourite triple-face also now has an official spin-off series supervised by Aoyama himself. 

Amuro is the most loyal lover