Movie Review: Dragon Ball Z - Wrath of the Dragon

Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon [1995]

The final Dragon Ball Z movie to be released before GT, and eventually 2013's Battle of Gods, I'm actually pleasantly surprised by Wrath of the Dragon, by how... oddly different it is. As the 13th DBZ movie, I'm just fallen into a rut with these movies introducing a random new villain without much personality like Cooler and Broly and Bojack and Turles and Slug and Janemba and Hatchiyack, and then just using the excuse plot to fill 40-50 minutes of screentime without actually developing any of these characters. 

Wrath of the Dragon... actually doesn't do that. The introduction of the villain, the ancient skull-smoke-cockroach demon Hirudegarn, is done relatively slowly, with a buildup of the relatively unique (if hackneyed) imprisoned-in-a-magical-music-box story behind it, and how our heroes are just manipulated by Discount Babidi Hoi to releasing one of these seals. Oh, and unlike most movies, which are tenuously slotted into the compact timelines of the manga (sometime in the future I'll probably do a 'movies and their place in the timeline' feature), Wrath of the Dragon has the advantage of taking place after the Buu Saga, allowing the writers to kind of do whatever they want without the audience going "hmmm it doesn't really make sense for two apocalypses to fuck up the Earth in-between the Saiyan and Freeza sagas, wouldn't it?"

I'm not the biggest fan of the huge opening scenes with the Great Saiyaman and... "Great Saiyawoman"? Which is apparently something that's exclusive to the anime? It certainly took me by surprise as neither Fusion Reborn or Dragon Ball Super ever indicated that Videl moonlights as a superhero that fangirls over Gohan at the same time. It's weird. 

Still, the Son/Briefs family end up using the dragon balls to wish for the breaking of the music seal, releasing this edgy-cool alien dude with a mohawk and an ocarina, Tapion. And I mean that as a compliment -- Tapion has that shoehorned "cool dude" deal going on, and actually manages to do it relatively well. He's actually important to the plot, but he doesn't act like he's better than anyone else. In fact, cursed to release the half of Hirudegarn sealed within him if he ever dozes off, all Tapion wants to do is to be secluded and be left alone, and the poor dude's just grief-stricken by the knowledge that he's found himself a couple hundred years from when he was first sealed, and his younger brother is most likely dead.

He ends up bonding with Kid Trunks (fitting, since Future Trunks is another example of a shoehorned "cool dude" anime character), who sees Tapion as a cool big brother, and it's honestly the biggest amount of personality I've seen Kid Trunks receive. It's such a shame that so much of the movies are just "Goku and Friends Save the Day" generic action movies, and the attempt at trying to integrate Tapion with his interactions with Trunks and Bulma is actually pretty neat. 

Hoi continues to menace our heroes, trying to break Tapion's mental fortitude, while Gohan and Videl fight the bottom half of Hirudegarn... which is literally just the bottom half of a demon, from the waist down, and it's just so absolutely dumb-looking... but I actually sort of like that it's actually just the disembodied top and bottom halves wreaking havoc until they get combined. And in practice Hirudegarn is literally just a rampaging kaiju monster that turns into smoke and shit, but honestly unlike most other DBZ movies, this is more of a Tapion movie with Hirudegarn being a literal plot device, so I don't particularly mind the villain being brutish and dumb because... well, we have Hoi to do that for us. Hoi's essentially Babidi, but it's a neat little trope -- a psychotic cultist trying to bring a powerful evil, only to be killed by said powerful evil. Hirudegarn actually feels like just a giant rampaging beast out of control, as opposed to the weird "am I mindless, or am I sentient" deal we had with Janemba. 

Sadly, at 50 minutes it does run a bit too long, and while it does feature some neat battle scenes, it does get repetitive at times with Hirudegarn repeating the same 'disappear into smoke and reappear' deal when fighting every Saiyan (and Videl). We did get a cool scene with Vegeta saving an office building, and Gotenks unleashing a pretty cool barrage attack... but sadly this movie just absolutely fails to stick the landing. While it has been building Trunks up throughout the movie (and if there was a secondary lead, it would've been Gohan), as Trunks tries to use Tapion's sword -- the same make as the one that Future Trunks uses -- to do something, Goku just tells Trunk to STFU, goes Super Saiyan 3, and uses the brand-new move DRAGON FIST to punch through Hirudegarn's stomach. A random time machine is pulled out for Tapion to time-travel with (what the fuck?) and Tapion gives Kid Trunks the sword... which... is a bit weird since this Trunks won't actually grow into Future Trunks.

So yeah. It's a pretty good movie up until the last 10 minutes or so which just insists on forcing the win on Goku despite Goku quite literally not doing anything for the majority of the movie. It's such a shame because between the unique backstory for Tapion and Hirudegarn, plus the large focus on Kid Trunks, this could've been a far better storyline... but instead it just really fails to stick the landing.