Dancing assassins and heartfelt melodrama make for an uneven but entertaining genre mashup
While Eiji Uchida’s (Greateful Dead) The Specials is shockingly not the only film screening at Fantasia this year to feature dancing Yakuza, it definitely leans further into melodrama than its organized-crime counterpart, Break Free. The film follows a team of elite assassins assembled by the Yakuza for one very specific reason: they all have a background in dance. Their target is an elusive crime boss who’s proven impossible to kill because he is fond of body doubles and rarely steps foot in public. The lone exception is his annual trip to cheer on his granddaughter at a local dance championship. To get close enough to strike, the assassins are trained by a young orphan girl and transformed into the dance troupe known as The Specials. If they can make it to the finals, they’ll be standing center stage right in front of their target.
Where Break Free borrowed from the Shall We Dance? playbook with a student-teacher romance, The Specials opts for a wise-beyond-her-years tween as its dance instructor. She’s one of the few people these hardened killers won’t intimidate, making her the perfect person to whip them into shape. More importantly, she gives the film its emotional center. For the most part, that relationship works, although there’s only so much emotional weight a child can realistically carry. The assassins themselves largely fall into familiar archetypes, while the film places most of its attention on the silver-haired Daiya (Daisuke Sakuma), who fittingly is a pop idol in real life.
Daiya is the son of a ballerina who became a legendary assassin before retiring to work at the orphanage where their pint-sized dance teacher lives. When the orphanage is threatened by developers, he reluctantly returns to his old profession to earn the money needed to save it—only to discover that his latest assignment requires him to dance, something he absolutely despises, because of his mother’s tragic death. Unfortunately, I never found Daiya as compelling as the colorful supporting assassins surrounding him. His heavier emotional arc injects a fair amount of melodrama into what otherwise feels like it wants to be a breezy, crowd-pleasing action comedy, and that imbalance kept me at arm’s length.
The action, however, delivers. Uchida stages several energetic fight sequences that blend clean choreography with playful dance routines set to infectious city-pop tracks. I only wish more of the ensemble had been given a chance to shine, because the supporting assassins are often more interesting than the film’s central hero. Still, The Specials ultimately succeeds as an offbeat genre mashup, balancing slick action, charming dance numbers, and just enough heart to overcome its occasional tonal stumbles. It may not hit every beat perfectly, but it’s an undeniably fun ride that embraces its wonderfully ridiculous premise with complete sincerity.
That sounds like a really interesting mix of genres, I’m always up for seeing how different styles can work together like that.