Next December, the highly anticipated “Dragon Ball Super Movie: Broly” (which will finally fulfill the wishes of many Dragon Ball fans of bringing the character to the canon) will hit theaters, so I decided to check once again “Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan”, the first of the 3 old DBZ non-canon movies featuring the villain and also the most popular and favorited one probably along “Fusion Reborn”, only to confirm my bewilderment on how can the former hold this distinction. First of all, most of the old DBZ movies tell a story that either just can’t fit in the chronology of the main story (implyinga continuity break) or unnaturally interferes with it in a questionable way, failing to build much interest in the audience due to the sense of irrelevancy and/or discontinuity, and this one is no exception. Right in the midst of the confrontation against Cell, and knowing how their world is in danger thanks to his presence, Goku happily accepts Kaio’s petition to investigate and deal with a threat coming from the southern galaxy without even knowing how much time this is going to take him, and Vegeta, who only wanted to fight Cell as soon as possible to prove himself, receives an invitation of another saiyan survivor called Paragus not only to become the king of a restored saiyan empire in a new planet, but also to fight against the legendary super saiyan who, according to Paragus, is causing havoc in the aforementioned galaxy, represents a threat to the new empire and Vegeta is the only one who can defeat him. The saiyan prince, who always heard stories about him, doesn’t even ask him why he would represent that since he was supposedly one of theirs, and tempted by the possibility to restore the glory of his race, also accepts to leave the same as Goku, both completely forgetting about Cell’s imminent threat and whose name, despite this, was curiously never ever mentioned throughout the entirety of this movie, as if that threat had never existed in the first place.
How is the audience supposed to buy this? Was it really that hard to add just a tad of credibility by just dedicating a few lines of the script to this situation? Just a simple “hey guys, let’s make this quick, remember we have to go back to Earth soon to fight Cell!”? I know this lack of credibility and realism is present in many DBZ movies, but that is still no excuse. Anyway, once they arrive on the planet, they meet Broly, the son of Paragus and a very peculiar saiyan survivor characterized by a suspicious calmed and gentle personality (an uncommon trait for the saiyan race), but who in reality was hiding a monster inside that was going to cause a lot of troubles for the Z team.
It just boggles me how Broly can be one of most beloved and popular villains among the DB fans. He is totally uninteresting, even for DBZ movies standards, or more precisely, was made uninteresting in the way. He could have been an intriguing villain. As someone who was overthrown and sentenced to death by his own people -given the threat he represented to the King for being born with an enormous power he had never asked for-, condemned to wander through the galaxies living in inhospitable conditions and who was later mind-controlled by his own father who wanted to make use of his colossal strength for his selfish purposes, he had a lot of valid reasons to be angry inside, to seek for revenge, and the potential to become more than just your average forgettable DBZ movie villain who wanted to conquer the world or something…was always there. But unfortunately, the movie failed to take advantage of this potential at all by presenting him at first as this enigmatic robotic dude who doesn’t say anything, doesn’t do anything besides making these wacky angry facial expressions whenever he stares at Goku (in such a way that it feels almost as if he was programmed to do so) and by then turning him into a dull over-muscled beast with just 2 brain cells: one that he uses to destroy and kill everything in his path, and the other one to yell: “Kakarott!”. And this was everything the movie did with his character, the famous Legendary Super Saiyan!
We never get to know how he really feels or what he thinks about everything he has had to live, what his true motivations are, because he never speaks a single relevant line about himself; when he’s not the beast, his mind and behavior are under control (with a machine that the movie never even bothered to tell us how his father invented or how does it work, not even a single simple and quick explanation: it just does!) and when he becomes the beast, he doesn’t (and maybe, he just can’t) say anything about himself either, he just limits to yell: “Kakarott!”, leaving everything to speculation and allowing for some people to believe that, given the few-friends face he put to Goku and the obsession he develops towards him, the reason of all his anger was as stupid as he couldn’t bear Goku crying all the time next to him when they were babies, when the case could have perfectly been that, for some reason, he was to him just the embodiment of all the suffering he had to go through. Things are, since the information provided was so little and confusing, we could never know, losing all the opportunities to make the audience feel anything for him. At the end of the day he’s a completely shallow character, nothing else but a killing machine that likes destroying everything in his way pretty much like how Kid Buu was, except this time not even half charismatic and “lovable” like he was.
The other aspects of the movie weren’t better. First, no matter how uninteresting your villain is, you can always arrange some exciting action scenes, which also wasn’t the case here. The confrontation (that takes half the movie) was incredibly tedious and flat, failing to create any tension or genuine excitement, so much that you just wanted the Z team to finish the job quickly to get back to Earth and resume their conflict with the much more interesting Cell.
Speaking about Cell, Goku’s complete carefree attitude like if he didn’t have to solve this situation as soon as possible because Dr. Gero’s creation was waiting for him, not giving weight to the threat, was not believable. Goku was never that dumb! (At least not in the Z era). Vegeta acting out-of-character, easily surrendering after noticing Broly’s superiority, and as the prideful warrior he always was, also didn’t make sense; that was never part of his personality. Gohan, who was supposedly as powerful as his father (or even more) by this time, didn’t do much besides being passively part of the final solution and helping the alien race from the harsh labor conditions under which they had to work for Paragus, the same as Krilin and Trunks. And Roshi and Oolong, who had absolutely nothing to do here, were also included in the quest just for the sake of adding unnecessary comedy, which was terrible, unfunny and totally forced, doing no favor.
Finally, the ending of the movie feels like…”well, let’s end this, whatever way, and let’s get out of here quickly”. After a tedious, over-stretched fight, we had a rushed conclusion with the climax literally happening in the last minute before credits start rolling and goodbye.
Art and animation are pretty good, and in fact, better than the actual main series. But every single DBZ movie also does, so this is nothing particularly special here. Though I have to say I liked the greenish design of Broly’s hair and aura, which highlighted his status as an advanced and superior super saiyan. The music included some of the main series tunes (at least in the Japanese version, don’t know the dubbed one) but somehow I feel it was just ok, it couldn’t emphasize the intrigue and the action enough as opposed to what the main series always did so well.
To sum up, “Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan”, was just a total letdown. It promised to be one of the best but at the end became one of the most lackluster of all the old DBZ movies. To be fair, most of them are, but as one of the most relevant given its direct connection with the franchise’s most important storyline (the saiyan race), in this case the result should have been better. It missed the opportunity to leverage the legend of the Legendary Super Saiyan (forgive the redundancy) Vegeta was always talking about during the Frieza arc and was painfully boring, as opposed to the other two Broly based movies (“Broly: Second Coming” and “Bio-Broly”) which at least were funnier to watch since they featured the naughty kids Goten and Trunks going in an adventure and were considerably more enjoyable. I’ll honestly never understand what the DB fans found so good and entertaining in this movie and in Broly, who to me was never anything else than an over-muscled, 2 brain-celled beast obsessed with Goku for God knows why reasons, and I’m really hoping the upcoming movie, this time canon, could do something more interesting with the character and his backstory. 4.5/10.
