A stylish and engrossing Japanese animated action thriller, GOLGO 13: QUEEN BEE follows a running battle between a high-tech hit man and a sexy female rebel leader against the background of the 2000 American presidential race.
Robert Hardy (voice of Dwight Shultz), the likely Democratic candidate for President of the US in the year 2000, is getting cryptic notes from Queen Bee, the female leader of the Comnero Liberation Army. His running mate, Thomas Waltham (voice of Carlos Ferro), hires Duke Togo, aka Golgo 13 (voice
of John DiMaggio), a highly paid international hit man, to kill the woman. Queen Bee, known to her friends as Sonia (voice of Denise Poirier), arrives in America and offers herself to Duke and tries to hire him to kill Hardy. He refuses, sticking to his strict policy of "one job at a time."
Sonia is actually Joanna, the illegitimate daughter of Hardy, abandoned by him as a child. Waltham, desperate to silence Sonia, has his military adviser, General Gordon (voice of John Hostetter) send a covert action team into the Central American jungle to wipe out the village outpost of the
Comnero Liberation Army. With Duke's reluctant help, Sonia escapes with her many children, each of them fathered by different men who have gone off and died for the cause.
At the Democratic Convention, accepting the nomination, Hardy breaks down on the platform, pulls out a gun and declares his love for his lost daughter Joanna and apologizes to her. He then shoots himself. At her father's grave, Sonia has her final confrontation with Duke. As she dies from his
gunshot, she declares that she's wired the necessary sum to his Swiss bank account. He knows what to do and goes on to kill both Waltham and General Gordon.
A 1998 made-for-video production, GOLGO 13: QUEEN BEE is only the second animated film based on the popular, long-running comic book character of the title, a stoic, rock-hard, top-dollar hit man who has no trouble attracting gorgeous women to him. The previous film, THE PROFESSIONAL: GOLGO 13
(1983), was a theatrical release (released in the US in 1993) by the same director. The new film tells a suspenseful, well-wrought story with numerous twists and turns packed into its 60-minute running time and underscored by a poignant back story of a family torn apart by political ambitions and
a little girl who acts out her bitterness in the international political arena. The animation succeeds in creating a modern-day noir look, with lots of close-ups, shadows, oblique angles, dramatic compositions, and quick cuts to suggest larger actions.
One of the rare anime to focus on American institutions, the film boasts a spectacular look at the 2000 Democratic Convention with echoes of THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). Its general view of American politics is pretty grim and the unlicensed American attack on a Central American village is
particularly harrowing (although topically out-of-date). (Extreme violence, nudity, sexual situations.) leave a comment