Importance Score: 52 / 100 🔵
Fresh from the A Bit Much Dept., Anime Division, is My Hero Academia: You’re Next (now on Netflix), the latest feature-length movie in a longstanding franchise that, like most properties of its ilk, seeks to bulldoze its audience with ungodly amounts of content. Which is to say, if you’re jumping aboard now, you’ll be lost lost lost – created by Kohei Horikoshi in 2014, the franchise includes a decade’s worth of manga, seven seasons of a TV series and four movies, as well as all the peripheral stuff (video games, “light novels,” a live-action film in development, etc.) that comprises the most popular anime IP. Chronologically, You’re Next — which was released theatrically in late 2024, was one of Japan’s top-earning films of the year and grossed a not-insignificant $32 million internationally — slots between the sixth and seventh seasons of the series, and finds superhero protagonist Izuku “Deku” Midoriya – who lives in a world where the majority of the population has superpowers dubbed “quirks” – and his too-many-to-list-here pals teaming up with a new hero to battle a new villain aiming to, of course, take over everything. Whether they succeed in staving off this new threat is sort of in question, but whether it takes increasingly escalating amounts of violence to do so is a certainty.
The Gist: Japan is still reeling a bit in the aftermath of the Paranormal Liberation War, which you all saw play out during My Hero Academia’s sixth season, right? Right. Deku (Justin Briner) and the rest of his Class 1-A compadres are on clean-up duty, scouring the city for villain stragglers, along with the other classes, which means we have roughly 274 heroes to keep track of. Or not. The movie will still be perfectly acceptably entertaining if I don’t list them all here, and we simply marvel at the weirdness of the rogue’s gallery, with all the garish costumes and bizarre powers that struck me as a conglomeration of Star Blazers, Guardians of the Galaxy and veritable assloads of psychedelic drugs. One villain has a giant gnashy-teeth mouth in his stomach and several appendages with gnashy-teeth mouths on them; another resembles a Fury Road truck dropped into the Cars reality, with the big eyeballs on the windshield and everything. Bottom line: No matter how high you are while watching this, you’re not high enough.
Further evidence of the previous assertion emerges with the onset of The Plot, which drops a villainous mafia family atop this scenario. Granted, it doesn’t need to be a mafia family, and the characters resemble an off-the-shelf conglomeration of superpowered wackjobs, but I guess it provides some color, and an excuse to garb up one of them in a pinstriped dress. The leader of the Gollini family is Valdo (Christopher Sabat), who declares himself the new “symbol of peace,” namely, the new All Might, which isn’t cool at all, since there’s still an old All Might (also Sabat) leading the heroes. Valdo at least has the courtesy to make this a touch less confusing by rebranding himself on the fly as Dark Might, which has those of us who bought New All Might T-shirts and other branded merch feeling a bit miffed.
Dark Might and the rest of the Gollini family make a rather aggressive real estate maneuver by transforming a chunk of the city into a floating fortress. His secret weapon is a girl named Anna (Kayli Mills), who he’s put in a trancelike state so he can use her incredibly powerful powers to enslave the population en masse. Then there’s this eyepatched motorcyclist with a transforming gun appendage named Giulio (Mauricio Ortiz-Segura), who’s trying to kill Anna despite being her friend, which doesn’t make sense until you realize she asked him to take her out if she was ever put in a trancelike state so her incredibly powerful powers wouldn’t be used for nefarious purposes. Deku winds up fighting alongside Giulio to thwart Dark Might and save Japan, which involves lots of fighting, yelling, exploding and other stuff that comprises violent conflict, because there’s just no talking this guy down, and I know that’s a gross oversimplification of what occurs here, but suffice to say that even a modest briefing of what plays out would take about 10 times longer than the movie’s run time. Most anime features wouldn’t have it any other way, of course.
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What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The core concept of My Hero Academia is similar to Sky High or the X-Men, but at this point, it seems like everyone involved has graduated from their studies to be full-time violenteers, and no, that’s not a typo. So take that base idea and smush it into the usual fodder of battle/sci-fi/fantasy/shonen anime, of which there are far, far too many examples, and they all tend to bleed together anyway.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: Do any of the vocal performances here rise above the din to make themselves distinguishable? Not really. I guess Sabat’s sneering vocalizing of Dark Might stands out…
Memorable Dialogue: …thanks to arrogant, antagonistic declarations like the following: “Allow me to explain it in a way that even an incompetent child like you might comprehend!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: A decade of unceasing content finds My Hero Academia straying from its school-for-supers premise, and You’re Next struggles to distinguish its fight/talk/fight/talk/fight/fight/fight plot from countless other anime features. There’s no shortage of energy and creativity within that formula, no doubt. And where it differentiates itself is in its relentlessly insane character design, which inspires equal parts awe and laughs – although the film’s attempt to jam dozens of characters into the action is a clear-cut case of quantity over quality. A strong opening stretch gives way to a saggy midsection and an impressively mayhemic climax, with the ending after the ending – complete with snippets of 2001esque psychedelic abstraction – adding a little more bloat to its 110-minute run time. If its goal is to overwhelm, consider it met.
Anime inevitably caters to its fanbase and why shouldn’t it stray from that M.O.? Its audience is international, devoted and legion, and like many subcultures, exists to shovel comfort food in front of hungry faces. What truly differentiates My Hero Academia from other similar franchises is admittedly lost on me, although its superhero action is a notch more inventive than mainstream Marvel and DC fare these days. It’s increasingly hard to deny its infectious enthusiasm and adherence to one of the core tenets of anime, namely, that no matter how loud and obnoxious the action, declarations of power and clingy riding-up-cracks costumes get, it can always inevitably go one louder. That can be fun for diehards and fairweathers alike, although fairweathers will never be able to penetrate the decade of dense plotting that precedes You’re Next. But of course, this is all academic.
Our Call: Can’t imagine My Hero Academia fans will find You’re Next underwhelming. So STREAM IT for its relentlessly zany superhero sci-fi action.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.