Some actors have a knack for picking good material. And some, like Shun Oguri, drift from stinker to stinker: "Museum," "Terra Formars," "Galaxy Turnpike," "Lupin the Third."
Still considered a box-office force despite this dismal track record, Oguri stars in "Gintama," the live-action adaptation of Hideaki Sorachi's long-running gag manga set in an alternative universe where aliens have conquered feudal-era Japan. Directed by Yuichi Fukuda, a comic-action specialist ("Hentai Kamen: The Abnormal Crisis"), "Gintama" is another manga adaptation with too much plot, too many characters and too much emoting at full volume, as though "loud" equals "funny." And playing the lazy swordsman hero Gintoki, Oguri spends much screen time with finger inserted in nostril prospecting for nose gold, one of several gross running gags.
But "Gintama" is not, on its own terms, a disaster. Gag manga, whose readers are largely maturity-challenged males, are rude and crude by design, and so are the films based on them. By (admittedly low) genre standards, "Gintama" does a superior job of extracting laughs from the products of Sorachi's demented comic imagination, which soars beyond booger jokes to the higher realms of local pop-culture parody.