Just watched: Liar Game: Final Stage

So this successful series gets a big-budget cinema send off to finsh the story. Except it's clearly not that big a budget, since it looks just like the TV version. And, just like the TV version, the storyline is mostly pushed forward by surprise results of each round followed by people laughing just before they reveal their fantastic strategy. And then being amazed when it doesn't work.

It's all fairly predictable, and the game was simple enough to follow and allowed for lots of back-stabbing so that was nice. Unfortunately, that was as far as it went. Nao filled her role as the perky optimist and, as always, Akiyama was the moody puppeteer, pulling the strings.



The story lacked a rival for Akiyama Shinichi. The idea that one of the players was a plant was nice, and kept me interested but it didn't have the same attraction as the battles of series one and two. The performances were fine. Seki Megumi (Sunao ni Narakute) stood out as a potential enemy, and Hamada Mari was great as one of Nao's allies.



After that, some of the characters were kind of anonymous. That's a problem with basing scripts on game theory: Sometimes the games need more people than you can write for. In fact, when one of the minor characters suddenly spoke towards the end of the film, I was quite surprised.

But now it is over, and the Liar Game is complete. A nice idea which perhaps went on a bit too long but kept me going to the end.

And I hope that was the end.