“Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless to Confess,” another film in the Pinky Violence DVD collection, is almost worthless to watch, though it’s not as silly as “Girl Boss Guerilla.” I imagine we should be grateful.
The story, which doesn’t really get rolling until almost the end of the film, involves a father (Junzaburo Ban) trying to pay off his daughter Midori’s (Yumiko Katayama) debt to some fairly inept yakuza. Thankfully, he has found an ally in Rika (Reiko Oshida), who was once in the same reformatory as Midori. There are several subplots along the way, too, but their relationship to the main story isn’t really known until the film’s climax.
What makes this movie so disappointing is that there are glimpses of what could have been an exciting, well-paced thriller on level with “Criminal Woman: Killing Melody.” These brilliant moments (and you’ll know them when you see them) don’t come often enough, however, and viewers are left with a story that goes all over place and doesn’t really gel until the last half hour or so. By then it’s too late. Any emotional investment the viewer has made has been depleted by side stories that are going nowhere involving secondary characters you never grow to care about.
The acting isn’t on par with the other Pinky Violence films, either, and the lead actresses here are nowhere near as charismatic as their counterparts in the other films. The action scenes are lackluster, too, though the revelations near the end of the film attempt to add some depth to a standard plot — something much needed. Had those revelations come earlier in the film where time would’ve existed to develop them, this could’ve been the best movie in the series. Instead, it is the worst.
This will stretch the tolerance of even the most liberal fans of these films. Though the DVD’s supplementary material seems to indicate that this is one of the better Pinky Violence movies, the final product says something else.
