Golgo 13: Queen Bee

Summary: >

The U.S. presidential elections are upcoming, so when one of the nominee's begins to receive death threats, keeping things quiet is of the utmost importance. The primary suspect is a woman known as the Queen Bee. She's second in command in a South American rebel group. Golgo 13 is hired to kill her, but finds his assignment to be a particularly big hassle with nearly everything going wrong. There's also the question of why this woman would want the presidential candidate dead in the first place.

Thoughts: >

Having confused the first film with Queen Bee in a review a long time ago, I figured I owed it to the Duke to properly review this one. More recently I watched the recent TV series and found out Golgo 13 is actually pretty cool. There are many things I didn't like about the first film, but at least it had fantastic visuals. That certainly didn't carry over here. Queen Bee is at the bottom of the list of things to watch as far as Golgo 13 goes. It gets the basic theme right, but misses the big picture.

Golgo 13 is hired to assassinate a woman known as the "Queen Bee". Being Golgo 13, this of course means he's going to bang the hell out her, but he also gets involved with her story. From his side, the OVA is basically a sniper's "worst day ever". Every time he's ready to take the shot, a crazy person or mishap interrupts him. Golgo 13 isn't much of a character, nor is he intended to be, so the focus of the franchise (per story) is either the story, mechanics of assassination, or character driven drama. This OVA focuses on the character side of Queen Bee. She's bent on revenge with her own reasons for wanting the presidential candidate dead. On the way she has sex with every man in the anime; some twice for good measure. Parts of her personality almost work, but she insists on explaining why she has sex with everyone with this weird philosophical stuff that is pretty dumb. Back in my day, being horny was enough. The plot is simplistic and no other characters are strong enough to carry the show.

The music is fair, but I can't say the same about the animation. The original Golgo 13 film was fantastic in that area, so I was looking forward to that in the OVA. Instead about 1/3 of the OVA are "triple repeat sequences" of still shots, and another 1/3 is panning over stills. The remaining stuff is well animated though...

The OVA doesn't degenerate into a brainless action flick like the first Golgo 13 film did, but it doesn't have the visual appeal to fall back on either. It's not terrible but not worth picking up. If you want to get what Golgo 13 is really about, watch the TV series.

Screen Caps: >