'School Police' review: Serves up teaching moments marred by unnecessary roughness

'Yeah, we're close. We even have the same hairstylist. Oh, you didn't know?' Photos: Handout

As high school dramas go, Japanese serial School Police has moments that rank up there with the best of them. One in particular, about a teenager abandoned by his flighty mother, may leave your guts in knots as the hapless youth finds himself slowly sinking into the morass of desperation.

As cop dramas go, School Police serves up an interesting mystery that, on its own merits, is more than tangled enough to command our attention.

Yet its writers felt compelled to have its central character get so wrapped up in his emotions that he often crosses the line of acceptable behaviour and lashes out at the people around him (verbally as well as physically), diminishing him in the viewer's esteem.

This 10-episode offering is, however, still very bingeable in spite of this glaring lapse.

It is both high school drama and cop show, in a combined premise: under a radical new programme, a police officer is stationed at an unruly middle school in Tokyo to keep its students in line.

Officer Ryuhei Shimada (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is the first of these school police, transferring over from the Violent Crimes section of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to Akamine Middle School.

Akamine seems like any typical school with its share of staff and student problems. Yet it soon becomes apparent that its classrooms and corridors hide some dark and twisted secrets with roots that run deep into the administration and student body.

'If you think I'm being rough on you now, you haven't seen me go full Dirty Harry. And I'm not talking about going days without a shower.'

And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Ryuhei has a very strong personal reason for taking up the position.

His Dirty Harry-ish tendencies are made clear to the viewer from the series' opening scene when he metes out some street justice to a group of prep school delinquents.

It's these tendencies that eventually endear him to some of the Akamine teachers, alienate him from others (including the dodgy and secretive principal), and have a similar polarising effect on the student body too.

And it's these tendencies that might end up alienating him from the viewer as well, because he does not so much cross lines as obliterate them completely with forearm chokes, abdominal claws (did he train under legendary pro wrestler Killer Kowalski maybe?) and some highly disproportionate aggression when dealing with schoolchildren.

Indeed, it would be hard to reconcile how he slips in and out of berserker mode and suddenly becomes an easygoing, admired figure if not for Fujiwara's familiarity and adeptness at playing ruthless and clueless but chill.

The actor should be recognisable to manga adaptation fans from his lead roles in the Battle Royale and Death Note movies (he was survival-driven Nanahara in the former, and antihero Light Yagami in the latter) and, pushing 40, has not lost his youthful appearance (a comb might have come in useful in some scenes though).

But he has honed a pretty well camouflaged mean streak in his characterisation here, and uses it well most of the time – when Ryuhei doesn't go ballistic and do himself a disservice, that is.

After weeks of endlessly wagging his finger at naughty students, Shimada was glad for a place to finally rest his hand.

School Police more or less operates on a student/teacher problem of the week format, with more screen time devoted in later episodes to the central mystery.

The standalone portions of each episode are not exactly groundbreaking TV drama, but they are certainly smartly plotted, and also well acted by the ensemble cast, to the point that you will feel for the bullied teaching interns, beleaguered students and victimised outsiders. (To be honest, the episode about the abandoned student left me quite the emotional wreck at some points.)

So School Police is, ultimately, a mixed bag that has more highs than lows, and easily binged.

It's hard to see how a second season can emerge from this, but if it does, one hopes that the events of the finale do propel Ryuhei out of the limbo of arrested development where he spends most of this initial season.

All 10 episodes of School Police are available on Netflix.

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