Review | Signal the Movie review: Japanese spin-off feature continues the time-bending crime busting in predictable fashion
- Signal plays fast and loose with time travel, and crimes are solved with little more impact in the past and present than the changing of a newspaper headline
- Curious parties approaching the franchise for the first time will be better served seeking out the TV series or the superior Korean original to begin with
2.5/5 stars
A spin-off of the successful Japanese television series from 2018, Signal the Movie tracks two police detectives, Saegusa and Ooyama, who are separated by time but connected by a pair of malfunctioning walkie-talkies, as they attempt to stop a bioterrorist group from executing a series of high-profile assassinations.
Signal: Long-Term Unsolved Case Investigation Team, to give the Japanese show its full name, was itself a remake of the 2016 Korean drama series Signal. This new film again follows a team of cold-case detectives in the present who can communicate with a police officer working in the same department 12 years earlier.
Employing a temporal pincer movement that would surely delight Tenet director Christopher Nolan, they are able to foil previously unsolved crimes, as well as prevent others from taking place.
When a government official is killed in his car with poisonous gas, detectives Saegusa (Kentaro Sakaguchi) and Sakurai (Michiko Kichise) connect the weapon to a notorious terror attack in 2001. The incident is also reminiscent of a pair of car crashes in 2009, in which two other local politicians were killed.