I don't really know a whole lot about the Cutie Honey franchise. I've seen Hideaki Anno's insane live-action movie, which starred the comely Eriko Sato, but I've never read the manga or watched any of the various anime series (the first of which, according to Wikipedia, aired all the way back in 1973) or anything. So I'm not really the guy to tell you how faithful this live-action series is to its animated roots, or how suitable the actors and actresses are for their roles (since I don't know anything about the characters in the first place). But, as I wrote in my review of the live-action You're Under Arrest, I prefer to judge these live-action adaptations on their own merits -- so long as the shows are enjoyable, I don't particularly care how far they stray from the source material.





And Cutie Honey the Live is, on the whole, a pretty enjoyable show, in a turn-your-brain-off kind of way. The characters are all a bit shallow (Cutie Honey herself is an airhead, and her ineffectual comedy-relief partner Seiji Hayami doesn't do much except get into trouble), and the plot -- in this first episode at least -- is pretty thin, but the pace is fast, and the ludicrous fight scenes and sight gags and over-the-top T&A are all entertaining.

The episode opens with three inmates (each at a different prison) who have somehow managed to get their hands on some highly advanced weapons (one shoots some sort of anti-gravity beam; another shoots blue energy bolts). Though they themselves appear to be unaware of where the weapons came from, the inmates all see opportunity and use them to escape. The sister of one of these inmates (the one who got the blue energy-bolt-shooting gun), anxious to see him returned to prison (because, she says, he had an unnatural affection for her and killed her fiance in some kind of jealous rage), decides to visit the Hayami Detective Agency -- a ramshackle building located under a bridge -- to see if Hayami, the agency's sole operative, can track him down. Hayami is a bit of a goofball, always ranting about what an awesome detective he is, but he agrees to take her case.





Meanwhile, we're treated to a bunch of voyeuristic shots of some girls undressing and undergoing health examinations at some school somewhere. The relevancy of these scenes is not immediately apparent; for the moment, they exist mainly to keep the more, shall we say, libidinous Cutie Honey fans from changing the channel amidst all this boring plot-stuff.

Hayami and the girl, Nana, visit her brother's defense attorney, who gives them a little background info on the murder he committed. Later, the two visit the parking garage where the murder took place, where, to their enormous surprise, they find Nana's brother lying in wait. He smacks Hayami senseless with a pipe and starts pleading pathetically with Nana to run away with him or something, and, in the course of their arguing, it's revealed (spoiler alert) that Nana herself was the one who did the killing, and that she callously used her brother's abnormal affection for her to get him to confess to the crime.

Anyway, the cops, who had apparently been chasing the escaped inmate, quickly converge on the scene and chase all three of them outside, but before they can apprehend anyone, they're all killed by a group of masked, knife-wielding hoodlums led by a weird androgynous dude. Nana's brother is killed as well, but Hayami manages to run away and call for the heretofore-unseen Honey. She duly arrives (she had previously been at school undergoing those health exams, hence the preceding scenes), transforms into the bodacious Cutie Honey, and starts kicking the crap out of the hoodlums. The fight scene that follows is a very, very silly one; Honey uses not only her fists and her feet but her breasts and her butt to fend off her attackers. Playing to her strengths, I suppose. Anyway, she has no trouble dispatching the anonymous hoods, but after the androgynous dude enters the fray (his primary weapon is his right hand, which has some weird feathers attached to it or something) she starts getting smacked around a bit. The episode closes with Feather-Fingers menacing a thoroughly defeated Honey. (It's also revealed, over the course of the episode, that Feather-Fingers was taking bets from a collection of shady characters as to which of the three inmates would survive the longest -- turns out he was the one who supplied them with the weapons they used to escape).





It's a speedy twenty-three minutes; the show jumps right into the action and keeps things moving at a nice, brisk pace -- Hayami's investigation proceeds quickly, and the episode's last few scenes are totally goofy and chaotic. (Of course, one of the problems with this speediness is that the show never stops to really introduce anyone besides Hayami -- the audience is not, for example, offered any sort of explanation as to how Cutie Honey came to be -- but I expect future episodes will probably take care of that). The tone is light and giddy -- the show's actors and actresses (particularly Syouma Yamamoto, who plays Seiji Hayami, and Mikie Hara, who plays Kisargi Honey/Cutie Honey) all ham it up like crazy, and, as I mentioned up above, there's quite a few sight gags and a boatload of risque stuff.

All in all: vacuous, but still quite watchable, and definitely worth checking out if (like me) you're a fan of these sorts of crazy live-action anime adaptations.

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