Ring: The Final Chapter (1999)

Ring: The Final Chapter (1999)

Dirs. Yoshihito Fukumoto (6) / Hiroshi Nishitani (4) / Hidetomo Matsuda (2)

12 episodes, approx 46 mins each (except Ep 12, which is approx 70 mins).

Given that Ring: TFC was Japan's third adaptation of Koji's Suzuki's Ring (1991) novel, it's no surprise that it deviates from the text even more than the previous two did.

Furthermore, it was made for television, not film, so one shouldn't expect a cinematic level with regards production, lighting, acting, etc. But I sure didn't expect drama on par with a third-rate Aussie daytime soap opera from the mid-90s, with similar banal predicaments and incompetent attempts at being emotive.

On the few occasions that it manages to haul its lumbering corpse out of that shameful pit, it has hints of an old BBC Children's drama, which is an infinitely better medium to aspire to, but it never stays that way for very long.

It has a cursed video cassette and the protagonist is once again a journalist, namely Kazuyuki Asakawa (Toshirō Yanagiba), with a young child (Yūta Fukagawa). The Ryūji Takayama (Tomoya Nagase) character also plays an important role, but the relationship between the two men differs to how Koji presented it.

Asakawa is a mostly crap father and a somewhat selfish friend, which engenders little to no sympathy; e.g. in episode 01 he picks up his son late from school, and then leaves the child unattended in a car park so that he can investigate a crash situation - the very same car park in which just a minute prior the kid had barely escaped getting run over by a speeding vehicle.

Asakawa's co-worker Akiko Yoshino (Kotomi Kyono) aids him in researching the origins of the video cassette footage. She has more positive traits in her little finger than Asakawa has in his entire body, but she's characterised too often by her fawning devotion to him than anything else, which robs her character of any proper independent standings - at least in the early episodes.

It adds a female doctor named Rieko Miyashita (Hitomi Kuroki), who's clearly a variation of someone that featured in Koji's second Ring novel, Rasen (1995), albeit gender swapped.

Of the many changes elsewhere, one of the lesser damaging ones is an extension to the duration of time allotted to the viewer of the cursed video cassette, bumped up from one week to thirteen days. It's a twelve episode series, so it makes a kind of sense that the curse deadline be further away. I'd like to say it uses the extra time well — to develop the themes in greater detail, for example — but it only really serves to make the whole thing feel even more drawn out and dull.

It was so lifeless that it took me two tries to get through the full series. On my first attempt, about two years before the date of this post, I gave up after five episodes. I tried again a few months ago and got through it from beginning to end solely for purposes of review.

It probably goes without saying that it's not a series I'd recommend to anyone who isn't heavily invested in the Ring world, but I don't think I'd encourage even folks that are to sit through it. Its length makes the prospect even less appealing than watching the US Ring films back-to-back.