Jmovie review: The Glorious Team Batista/ Team Batista no Eiko

There's a reason why I didn't even bother with the jdorama from last season besides the fact that Densha can't act to save his life. The movie is good enough that I can't see them doing the movie justice, not with the poor casting with overactors. Some of you may be sick of batista surgeries after Iryu 1 & 2. After all, Iryu probably has done every conceivable angle/emergency for that surgery. Nothing can match Iryu's cool factor and I didn't want to see a poor Iryu copycat.

I would check myself into hospital just to be in the same room as these two.

Good thing Team Batista no Eiko is not really about batista surgery and major complications that never happen in real life. Rather, its a mystery movie set in the surgical department of a hospital. Like Iryu, this movie is about a team which has been very successful with batista surgery despite it having a high failure rate. When the team encounters successive failures, an investigator is dispatched from the ministry of health to find out the cause and he seems to think the deaths were deliberately caused.


The biggest reason to watch Team Batista is the casting. Abe Hiroshi and Takeuchi Yuko! Do you even need any other reason? Two of the best actors in jdorama! Put those two in any crappy jdorama and they will at least make it watchable like Egao no Hosoku! That show had a drab boring script but they managed to keep me entertained to the end. Abe as usual plays the cocky health minister guy. He walks around the hospital like he owns the place and throws his ministry credentials around. Takeuchi Yuko plays a psych/counselor doc who is given the responsibility of investigating the batista deaths. She's this timid, soft spoken doctor who is given a task seemingly out of her league but Abe's antagonistic behaviour gives her the motivation to try to solve the mystery.


In the bastista team we got Kunio from GTO and Igawa Haruka and some other familiar jdorama faces. The tone of the movie is serious with Abe providing much of the understated humour. The film is shot with a grainy look which gives it a grittier feel without any crazy wide angle, slow mo shots and very limited music. This movie is all about the actors and the mystery.


You have your red herrings and your revelations. The most important part is there are clues about the reveal scattered in the movie. Its a competent mystery augmented by great acting. I can see how this movie could work as a jdorama but its a slow burn mystery. They can't do a big twist/revelation every episode so it really requires very good acting to keep the viewer's attention. I had a blast watching this movie and hopefully one day we'll get to see another Abe-Takeuchi Yuko dorama if Abe can stop doing NHK shows.