Live action game films come in two flavors: entertainingly bad and painfully unwatchable. Why? Perhaps it’s because they can stray too far from the source, messing with the paper-thin plot of a game until it becomes even more ridiculous than the source. That’s why the first trailer for the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney film makes us cautiously optimistic. As you can see from the Japanese trailer, it looks like it stays pretty true to the first game’s plot…
It’s nice to get a real look at the film instead of snippets with talk show hosts screaming over it. And we love that all the characters look so accurate to their in-game selves, no matter how silly the hair styles may look on a real person. With moments from multiple cases of the first game on display (with big spoilers for those that know what they are), the Phoenix Wright film looks on track to at least be stunningly accurate. Whether it’s good or not is another question, but director Takashi Miike can usually be counted on to make admirably ambitious movies even if they don’t always pay off, so it at least won’t be boring.
