he 26-episode run of the Cowboy Bebop TV show ended on a melancholy note, as bounty hunters Spike Spiegel, Jet Black and Faye Valentine, and their little hacker-genius fan Ed Wong, went their separate ways and met their separate fates. But a few years after the show ended, original director Shinichirô Watanabe returned with a cinematic spinoff that preceded the team's breakup—if a group of people who don't like each other, generally refuse to work together, openly abuse each other and just happen to get around on the same ship could be said to constitute a "team."
As Cowboy Bebop: The Movie begins, Spike (Lucas) and Jet (Billingslea) are in their usual state of poverty; as freelance bounty hunters who rarely, throughout the course of the TV series, actually got their man, they don't earn enough money to be able to afford luxuries like meat. Faye (Lee) is sometimes more successful, in part because of Ed's amazing computer skills, which take most of the work out of working for a living. But even once Ed locates Faye's latest target, a small-time hacker with a price on his head, Faye fails to corral him—as she approaches his truck on a busy Martian highway, it stops on an off-ramp, a trench-coated figure emerges, and the truck explodes. Hundreds of people in the area quickly succumb to a mysterious illness that doctors can't explain or cure, and the Martian government responds to the subsequent wave of fatalities by declaring that the explosion was a terrorist act and putting a hefty bounty on whoever was responsible.
The prospect of huge piles of money is enough to get all the members of the Bebop's quarreling crew into the chase, but with their usual offhanded contempt for each other, they all go about things in their own way—Jet speaks to his police contacts, Faye solicits Ed's help and goes hunting alone, and Spike wanders the streets, letting his casual charm and confidence speak for him. Ultimately, the threads come together in near-fatal ways, as they uncover a horrific conspiracy that leads back to one horrific conspirator, a man with a haunted past and some fairly unclear goals.
Mismatched cops that seem to fit right
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie's main problem is that it's basically a police procedural, except that the Bebop crew don't fit particularly well into the police roles. Toward the film's end, Jet suggests that the problem they're all chasing is way too big for them; Spike later says he can't let it go, for reasons that seem both out of character and abstractly pretentious. That often sums up the movie, which tries to force the loose, hip characters of Cowboy Bebop into a plot that holds surprisingly close to the dry, solemn story arcs of the Patlabor movies (Patlabor 1: The Movie, Patlabor 2: The Movie and WXIII), from the nature of the antagonist right down to the final confrontation in a tower.
Of course, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie isn't quite as subdued as Patlabor, even in its quieter moments. And in its loud scenes, when the characters are foiling a robbery, engaging in a firefight with their latest nemesis or leading a pack of enemy jets on a wild midair chase, the old Cowboy Bebop style looms to the fore, and the spinning, wild, angular animation overwhelms the screen. Yoko Kanno's music, as ever, contributes a great deal to the tone, whether Watanabe is going for quiet, eerie reflection, jazzy chase music or a bluesy, easygoing street feel. The dub's voices continue to be exceptionally well suited to the characters, and the movie's nearly two-hour length leaves plenty of time for little pieces of character business. For fans who just want to see their favorite character in action again, Cowboy Bebop has it all: Ed is wacky and weird, Faye is bitchy and self-assured, Jet is quiet and a bit despairing over the crew's dysfunctional relationship, Spike is snarky, confident and cool, and all of them bounce off of each other in familiar and entertaining ways.
And, truth be told, the movie's villain is pretty intriguing, in that familiar Cowboy Bebop way, in which attitude and panache are more important than logic and closure—which is fortunate, since the movie is a bit short on the latter. Ultimately, the story doesn't quite hold together, and only the spectacular style stands out. But that's so typical of the Cowboy Bebop franchise that regular viewers likely won't mind.
