Since it's been awhile since an AD Police title was released, Parasite Dolls was greeted with high hopes.

Parasite Dolls
Movie, 2004. Director: Noriyuki Onda, Koichi Hashimoto. 95 minutes, DVD, bilingual, $29.98. Distributor: ADV Films.

This is one title that I was particularly excited about seeing because it takes place in the Bubblegum Crisis universe. For those of you who are not familiar with the Bubblegum Crisis universe (and you should be ashamed of yourself) let me sum it up for you. We have a setting in Japan in the future around 2030, and mankind has begun to rely on robots called "boomers" to help with everything from hostile environment construction to the person who stands in the fast food service window. These boomers are produced the great mega corporation called Genom. Boomers begin to attack and harm humans and the police are in force to try and stop them.

Only the regular police find that they are ill-equipped to stop them. Enter the AD Police, a highly trained and heavily armed special section of the police who exist to combat terrorism and the boomer threat in Tokyo. Sadly, in Bubblegum Crisis the AD Police suffers from a lack of funding and a bigger fight with red tape than haywire robotics. This inability to deal with the boomer threat gives rise to the lovely ladies of the Knight Sabers, and, with their specialized powered armor hard-suits, they kick some serious boomer buttocks.

After Bubblegum Crisis was released, it achieved a fair amount of success and built quit the fan base. Later, an alternative story was told within that same universe. That story was that of the officers of the AD Police, and, in the 1990s, the first AD Police OAVs were released in the United States by Manga Ent. Compared to BGC the AD Police stories offered a much grittier and mature type of story. With its heady plot and very violent action AD Police was a cop drama without the pretentiousness of Ghost in the Shell.

Parasite Dolls is another layer into the BGC universe. It is the story of Branch, a shadow wing of the AD Police. They are a specialized unit who deal with especially brutal crimes concerning boomers. Their methods are -- shall we say -- slightly outside the normal protocols of how the police are supposed to operate. We have our main character Buzz, a hardened detective with a past whose work is his life.

Then there is Michaelson, one tough chic who is out to prove something. Kimball is a boomer that is supposed to be Buzz's partner and shows sign of a soul. Angel is the sexy and flirty undercover operative that is the eyes and ears of the Branch inside Genom. And, to round out our group of usual suspects, we have Myers the genius, hack any system, techno geek, and Takahashi the sarcastic chief that knows too many people to lose his job.

It's been a while since the last AD Police title, so when I saw this one coming down the pipe I had pretty high hopes for. And, to be totally honest, I am kind of split on this one. Parasite Dolls is broken up into three separate chunks or acts. Naoyuki Onda directs the first and third acts while Koichi Hashimoto directs the second act. These three acts take place over a period of seven years following the Branch team as they solve boomer crimes and begin to uncover a conspiracy. While this seems like a novel idea for this type of story, its fails miserably in execution. Regardless of how a movie plot is constructed it should follow the three-act format where there is the establishment of a problem, a rise in action and then a resolution.

Parasite Dolls follows this plot template within each chunk, but not as movie as a whole. As a result Parasite Dolls feels more like a series of animated shorts rather than as a whole movie. Each of its three parts stands alone as a short and really has nothing tying the other chunks together. As a result, you could watch this movie with its acts rearranged in any order and still follow it just the same. It is unclear why this movie wound up like this, but after watching it, I felt as if Parasite Dolls started as more of a series instead of a movie. That and either the production company ran out of funds or the writers realized that they couldn't pull enough of a story together for the length of a series. At any rate this is the weakest part of this title.

On the other hand, if you look at each act as its own mini-movie, it really has its moments. Act One has the Branch team hunting selected boomers that are supposed to go off their rocker and start raising hell throughout Tokyo. All the while, these rouge boomers are being watched by voyeurs on virtual reality gear. Act Two has a boomer crusher that is targeting boomer prostitutes. And Act Three has Buzz and crew trying to uncover a political conspiracy. Underlying questions about what makes something alive, and can machines ever truly be accepted as living by humans are dealt with in a rhetorical manner in the second and third acts, but never really developed.