With the manga series having been published in Japan since 1994, and the anime broadcast on TV since 1996, Case Closed (or Detective Conan as it's known in most of the world), is an incredibly popular series.  Each year at the beginning of May, a new theatrical movie based on the series is released, and they've all done rather well at the box office.  Funimation has released the second movie in region one, The Fourteenth Target.  While the film starts off with a good mystery and some interesting background information, it soon gets dull.  Filled with various people relating their life stories, the pace is slow and really drags in parts.  Unfortunately the exciting end isn't enough to make up for the rather slow show.

The Show:

Shin'ichi Kudo (Jimmy Kudo in the English version) is a teenage detective who is one of the best investigators around.  The police often solicit his advice on their toughest cases, and he's taken all of the business away from the city's other private eyes even though he's still in high school.  All of that changes one night while Jimmy is out at an amusement park with his girlfriend Ran Mouri (Rachael Moore.)  He sees a crime going down and investigates only to be caught by a pair of thugs.  They give him a new experimental poison so that he won't talk, but the poison doesn't kill him.  Instead it causes him to become younger, much younger.  When he wakes up he's a little kid.  He still has his razor sharp intellect, but no one wants to hire a ten year old detective.

Ran discovers the little Shin'ichi wandering around and takes him home with her.  So that his true identity will remain a secret he tells her his name is Conan Edogawa, taken from his idol, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes.)  Ran's father, Kogoro Mouri (Richard Moore), is an incredibly incompetent detective, and Conan soon starts tagging along on Richard's cases.  Using some nifty inventions his friend Dr. Agasa invented, and the aid of the Junior Detective League; Ayumi, Mitsuhiko. and Genta (aka Amy, Mitch, and George), Conan is able to solve the cases without anyone knowing that he's the real brains of the operation.  The downside is that with just about every case he solves, the bumbling Richard Moore becomes more famous.

This movie:

Conan handles one of his toughest cases yet.  When a criminal that Kogoro put in jail years ago (when he was on the police force) is released, friends of the detective are attacked.  At the scene of each crime is a playing card, and the name of each victim is somehow related to the number on the card.  Conan has to discover who the next one in line is before the villain attacks again.  The attacks get more sever, and soon people start turning up dead.  Can the pint-sized detective put together just who is behind these crimes, where they are, and who is next on their list before he kills again?

This movie started off well, with an interesting series of crimes and some unexpected background involving Ran and her parents, but soon stalled and became rather yawn inducing.  Once the pattern was discovered, Conan and the gang spend a gook chunk of the movie running around to different people, explaining the situation, and warning them that they might be next on the murderer's list.  They then get to hear the potential victim's life story.  *yawn*  While this is fine in small doses like in the TV show, when they do it over and over the movie just grinds to a halt.

The mysteries on the TV show are often a little ludicrous, but I was hoping that they'd put a little more thought into the story for a feature movie.  Well, I was wrong.  The final solution to the mystery, just who the murderer was and why turned out to be just as idiotic as the worst examples of the TV show.  To add insult to injury, the "proof" that Conan finally discovered was so tenuous and inconclusive I'm surprised that anyone took it seriously.  If the culprit would have said "I found it on the floor" at one point, the whole case would have unraveled.

While the middle section and the resolution of the story were less than astounding, the final chase sequence was pretty fun.  There was a lot of action and excitement, and this ended the film on a high note.  It's just too bad that the rest of the movie wasn't as enjoyable as the last 10 minutes.

Audio:

This disc offers the choice of the original stereo Japanese soundtrack, or an English dub, also in stereo.  I was a bit surprised that they didn't include a 5.1 English dub like the releases of the TV series.  I screened this with the Japanese track and spot checked the English dub, and I enjoyed the original audio a bit better.  The English audio was good though, with the actors doing a fine job.  There weren't any phony accents, something that I really dislike.  The audio quality was fine, there wasn't a lot of range, but there weren't any defects either.

Unlike the TV releases, this movie has blotted out the Japanese subtitles that introduce the various supporting characters.  There is a grey box with the information in English placed over the Japanese characters.  The TV show doesn't translate these at all, and here they deleted the original text.  Why can't they just leave the image alone and translate the text in subtitles?  Would that be so hard?

Video:

This theatrically released movie comes with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio that looks pretty good.  This movie looks a lot better than the TV shows on DVD, mainly because of the near absence of compression artifacts that plague the TV show releases.  The colors are solid but not terribly bright, but the lines are tight and the blacks are strong.  While this isn't the most eye-popping animation that I've ever seen, the disc looks fine for what it is.

Extras:

Like the TV series releases on DVD, there are no extras included on this disc.

Final Thoughts:

This movie just isn't that good.  The pace is slow and I had trouble keeping my interest through the hour and a half running time.  Added to that is the rather silly solution to the mystery that was really lacking.  Playing like a 23 minute TV show that was padded out to 90 minutes, fans of the program might want to rent this, but others should just skip it.