I wasn’t planning to watch this movie, since I only bothered with a dozen episodes, a few clips, and didn’t like any of them. But then a friend of mine who is a huge fan and has been following Gintama religiously insisted on watching it together. I was going for Fast & Furious 9, but he said ‘that is a stupid movie of a franchise that overstayed its welcome’. Unlike this smart movie which is not part of a franchise that overstayed its welcome. I mean, if it’s the second best anime of all times according to MAL (at the time of posting this) and the Gintama entries take up half of the top 20 in general it can only mean it’s a masterpiece according to the majority. And the majority is never wrong. So I watched the movie and I hated it and I wasn’t planning to make an overview about it, but then I found a Reddit topic where someone insisted that if Gintama isn’t in your top 10 it means you either didn’t watch it or you dropped it early on. Especially if you watched a lot of anime. It triggered me enough to write this text. Thus it’s not my fault, it’s his fault.
So the movie starts by trying to fool you into thinking it’s going to be serious, since aliens invaded earth and everyone is about to die. And then anime references appear that have nothing to do with the plot, ruin the seriousness, point out the lack of creativity Gintama has, and how it would never be popular if it wasn’t taking advantage of other popular titles. I know what you’re about to say. But Snob, Gintama was always doing that so it makes sense to keep doing that, if you don’t like it. Such a bold claim from the fans who agree that they didn’t like Gintama until they watched 150 episodes. No show that demands from you to watch 150 episodes before you start liking anime references can be considered great.
Also a movie should be good by itself, regardless of not watching everything that came before it. Well, this movie sucked ass in terms of pacing. It had a ton of flashbacks to stuff that you already know from the series, and even if you don’t know because you didn’t watch the show, the flashbacks were so many, so long, and interrupted the plot so often to the point you didn’t give a shit. My friend who is a diehard fan of Gintama, was playing a Dragonball gatcha game during the flashbacks because he got bored of them.
When the plot was not interrupted by flashbacks, there was a lot of action, which wasn’t good at all. Remember when I said I wanted to watch Fast & Furious 9 instead of this movie? Well I watched it the next day and what did you know, it was the exact same thing in terms of action. Dozens of bad guys shooting, multiple explosions and crashes and beatings, and none of the good guys ever got hurt. It was impossible to take it seriously. And I know that many of you are going to say, I didn’t watch enough episodes to get used to the action being like that. The fights were always that improbable and if you had watched 500 episodes, you would like them. No, I wouldn’t. I would hate them every single time, because they can’t be taken seriously despite the show desperately trying to come off as serious in those scenes.
There is a scene where a dog shits out old men, who turn out to be Gintoki’s legs, so the dog needs to eat them and then puke them so they can combine. This thing happened in the middle of a serious battle. My diehard Gintama friend was eyerolling. The final duel has the bad guy slashing and punching Gintoki a hundred times. He lost 10 gallons of blood and every bone in his body broke. 10 seconds later he was perfectly fine. What kind of a final battle is this? The same shit was happening all the time in Mortadello and Filemon, another movie I watched weeks ago and it was brilliant there, because it never tried to take itself seriously. There was never any tonal whiplash, since it always had the same comedic tone. Gintama is the definition of tonal whiplash and anyone who insists it’s amazing for instantly switching from tragedy to comedy is an idiot.
Then the battle ends and I have no idea what happened. Something-something mind control, something-something multiple personalities, something-something I regret being a bad guy who wanted to kill everyone so let me magically fix everything and you can all forgive me. What a load of bullshit. Gintama should have stayed as nothing more than a plotless rip off of popular shonen instead of trying to have a dramatic plot. Everyone will tell you the same, diehard fans included.
And then it gets worse. The movie goes on to show the aftermath of the story and how every character got his closure. Or better say, didn’t. Because it’s basically the same joke a dozen times. They tell you this character changed completely later on, only to be proven it was a troll and absolutely nothing changed. 500 episodes, a dozen movies and a gazzilion adventures later we got zero plot progression, zero character development and zero story closure. Everything ended exactly as it began. Where’s this amazing story all the fanboys kept talking about? ‘Gintama is not just references and toilet humor, it also has an amazing plot’. How is that possible when nothing changed in the entirety of the series?
And it doesn’t even stop there; the end credit scene shows the mangaka self inserting as a gorilla and telling the audience that he didn’t want to give closure to anyone so the fans can speculate anything they want about them. What a genius. Why bother thinking of an ending when the fans are going to make one for you? Less effort, more praise. And that was the end of Gintama. A movie I see nobody’s talking about, regarding a series that nobody cares about for a long time now.
