Kamen Rider × Kamen Rider Wizard & Fourze: Movie War Ultimatum.

The Curtain Opens on the Ultimate Showtime. Wizard, the Promise to the Future. Fourze, the Promise Five Years Later. In order to fulfill these 'promises', they must return to the battlefield.

Alright, let's start with the Fourze portion! What started as an epilogue for the series, which I was hoping to be of similar quality to what OOO got in the cross over with Fourze quickly descended into something written like a really bad piece of fan fiction. It's hard to articulate why I hated this, not because I myself am confused, but I can just tell I'm going to have a hard time convincing why it was a problem.

Fourze is childlike, it's part of what it is, it exists in this parallel fantasy universe where even being murdered is something one can shrug off and smile and laugh about later and it really didn't fucking work and that was in a fifty episode series. This idealism smashed into fifty minutes just makes for the most awful awful viewing experience.

I kept waiting for Gen and Sakuta to fuck the way the whole thing played out like some thirteen year old girls fantasy ending for the series, deciding that wish fulfilment makes for better writing than actually trying to wrap up the series or provide any kind of satisfying conclusions for...anything.

Just no, no to everything. Sakuta wouldn't have teamed up with Inga and become an Interpol agent in five years. Gen is physically too thick to become a teacher in the first place, but it'd take him hell of a lot longer than five years to have his own class, I'm not even sure you can become a professional football player in five years, oops (whose name I'm too angry to remember right now) seemingly only became a model so the director can continue to creepily drool on the female cast members, reducing her and 'the psychic girl' to close ups of their skirts for an entire action sequence, while also dressing Yuuki like a weird parallel whore version of herself for a space mission for no apparent reason.

Why is it that the films paint the entire Fourze cast in such a disgusting and unflattering light? If I had watched these films, without watching the show, I'd be in for a real shock to find that they are nothing like these poor imitations. Hell the head writer for the fucking show has a credit on this, so how do you misunderstand your own characters this much? I kept waiting for it to end with Gen waking up from a daydream in class, but nope, this is the epilogue Fourze gets, what a fucking pile of bilge.

And for moments, the Fourze segments seems to have some form of clarity in just how dumb this all is, but then those moments quickly pass and the film carries on taking this ridiculous and ill fitting epilogue seriously.

And don't even ask me why Gen suddenly threw the Fourze Driver away and destroyed it, I have no fucking idea what he was thinking or why anyone would allow him to do that but I guess this stops him coming back for any more films... What the fuck is going on?!

Also, the fuck was well...everything else? It seemed like it got padded by someones margin doodles just chucking random half formed ideas in there like fucking psychic mutant Inuzaman or whatever the fuck his name was and a new appearance from Kamen Rider Goo. It's pointless, and wastes my time, and this whole segment is fucking garbage.

Even the action wasn't that great, as it presented us with some of the crappiest wirework I've seen for about a decade. I do love that Fourze in the films whizzes through lots of Switches in rapid succession so he can embody what his powers are about but I'd still rather just watch the series than ever repeat these fifty minutes of my life again.

Okay, time to calm down and move onto the Wizard portion... My main question is, what the fuck was this trying to say? Much like the show, this isn't really Haruto's gig but the Gate's. Our Gate is a girl so disillusioned by the mundanity of reality, that she'd happily escape to an Underworld that repeats the same day infinitum, where she gets to be a superhero and save the world. What is more interesting, what is more confusing, is that this is presented in a negative light, Haruto and the gang are trying to get her to wake up from this and face reality.

This is a great moral message, "wake up and smell the coffee!" But wait...don't we turn to the repetitive, formulaic toku and its superheroes to escape the mundanity of our own realities? We know that near enough every toku episode is going to be the same, like groundhog day, and yet we happily tune in every week because it presents a black and white world, where things go right more than they go wrong, unlike our own lives. Aren't we all Poitrine? Is being an adult Toku fan the same as being in her Underworld? Is Wizard trying to tell the adults in the audience to move on and grow up? To stop criticising something made for children and just get on with their own lives? I'm probably over thinking this - giving it to much credit but I couldn't quite tell if I was meant to be offended by all this.    

It was better than Fourze's portion though, either way. probably because Wizard is so consistently flawed that it is so much harder to fuck up. Haruto was as great as ever, but I wish this badass gunslinging version of Rinko would turn up in the show sometime. She was sexier than anything we were supposed to dribble over in the Fourze part.

Wizard is an insanely cool Rider but his powers are a lot more basic than Fourze's, so I appreciated how they made every movement exaggerated and stylish so he could compete visually, I had so much more fun watching Wizard than I did Fourze in the end because it seemed they put way more effort into his fights to balance it out.

The only thing that lets Wizard's portion down in the action is it seems they just found a load of old monster suits from Fourze and OOO and threw them in there. Bamba was pretty shit, to be fair, but at least he wasn't just an old dusted off costume. Plus even though this assumedly had a bigger budget, the giant CGI monster fights look just as awful here as they do in the show.

Now let's move on to the final portion, the Ultimatum portion where Fourze, Meteor and Goo get to meet Wizard and the gang and fight with them and man, who knew this'd turn out to be so good?! It wraps the movie together fantastically and comes with quite a few surprises that will have everyone in the audience screaming and jumping around. I almost broke my bed in the fit of excitement. I just wish Eiji was around longer. His appearance was short but sweet.

Also, all the Riders just seem to come together much more cohesively than they have in the other films I have seen, the chemistry between the Riders was just fantastic and watching them fight together was just awesome. Even the modern Riders get to make use of their bikes for once! This war is a spectacular one, which makes the pretty shitty first half an hour almost seem worth it. Almost.

Really the only disappointing thing is that it is all so spectacular, when it comes down to taking down our main trio of villains it just doesn't end up competing or comparing and comes off a little flat. They turned out to be largely pointless and the whole thing didn't really have any plot, which spoilt this final but ultimately enjoyable segment.

So do I recommend it? Honestly, not really. The war bit of the movie was absolutely fantastic, but as I watched the Directors Cut that made up about twenty minutes of a two hour film. And although the Wizard but wasn't horrible, the Fourze bit was and I really don't think it's worth putting yourself through for a fight at the end. But maybe you do.

Think About It!

-Locke

What would you rate, 'Movie War Ultimatum'?