Introduced briefly before his Death Note/Desu nôto and its sequel Death Note: The Last Name aka Death Note 2, director Shusuke Kaneko took off to see “Fantastic Four Two” but was promised back for post-screening appearance and signing. A few among the hyped up “you people rock!” audience had come Goth-punk style à la razor-toothed, black-clad, apple addict god of death Ryuk (voice of Shido Nakamura), while a side-pigtailed girl got one of the boxed-set prizes for her Pippi Longstocking getup as short-skirted, Bambi-eyed Misa Amane (Erika Toda).

Among Japan’s biggest grossers last year, the total four-and-a-half hours are adaptations of a popular, even more complicated manga. The term invented in 1814 by master Hokusai for his “whimsical sketches” and now taken in the West to mean the print cartoons and long comics -- thence, graphic novels -- increasingly translated into live-action or animated (anime) film, the manga form is a mega-billion-dollar global phenomenon which a Japanese film historian equates with detachment, style, look, attitude, “cool.”

These two films, however, would at first seem to aim at something deeper, although smart money must be against any such “meaning” as being their attraction for the full auditorium at Japan Society’s Japan Cuts, a second-venue extension of the New York Asian Film Festival. The spontaneous response usually accorded live performance of, say, wrestling or rock concerts, lasted way longer than warranted but at last petered out into restive silence when  second part twists, turns and talk took over.

There is an undercurrent, finally submerged, lost and unconvincingly mouthed, in this comic book and cinema staple of the vigilante who would revenge personal or societal wrong by doing himself what officialdom cannot, or will not, do. The superhero seeker of justice may be misunderstood and unfairly accused of criminality; or, as in Death Note, one has the also old idea of power corrupting, of going too far in the name of a purported “good,” a premise that gets obscured in the shuffle of characters, quirks and complications.

Sickened by an underworld flaunting its own vileness and the ineptitude of the authorities, Light Yagami (Tatsuya Fujiwara) is given what he unconsciously wishes for, and, as in countless cautionary tales, the gift turns out to be more than bargained for. Ryuk drops a notebook in the law student’s path which, behind a lot of rules suited to the plot at any particular moment, confers the ability to kill by writing down a person’s name and envisioning his face. This variant of recent J-horror’s deadly monitors, videotapes, chips and cellphones, is first used to off global bad guys, prompting media frenzy and debate about whether this mysterious “Kira” is good or evil, avenger or murderer. The field of operations widens, the national police investigation is headed by Light’s detective father Soichiro (Takeshi Kaga), and, much later, a Kira II enters play, the fetishist’s dreamgirl and TV teeny icon Misa, who is seconded by white mop-headed god of death Rem (voice of Peter), who sort of falls for her.

Whether ends justify means, whether one goes too far -- all falls by the wayside as, after a deliberate false lead (Matt Lagan, as Lind L. Taylor), International Criminal Police Organization officials contact sweet-toothed supposed boy genius crime-solver L aka Ryuzaki (Kenichi Matsuyama) to establish command post in his place; the FBI bungles along with thirteen agents that include Raye (Shigeki Hosokawa), whose fiancée and ex-L operative Naomi Misora (Asaka Seto) messes up even worse; devious Saura-TV anchorwoman Saeko Nishiyama (Sakura Uehara) is ousted by formerly but no longer sympathetic employee Kiyomi Takada (Nana Katase), who acquires a death notebook and yellow eyes.

These and other characters multiply, plot turns back pointlessly and often upon itself, Ryuk is given a couple good lines but grows stale, while Rem lacks that light touch of evil and never takes off; Light vacillates from depressed idealism to bad and then back to good and on to obsessional nasty, Misa replaces his cruelly axed girlfriend Shiori Kashino (Yu Kashii) but is a cloying washout, and orphan L’s idiosyncrasies are tiresome.

Projected or printed, “not all but some definitely darned good,” fusing Japan’s “traditional love for popular art that entertains” with post-1945 imported American strips and comic books soon demonized here by Cold War panic, the manga-anime is the uninvolved, danger-at-a-distance in small bytes on which so many young people have been nurtured. Surface is important, cause and chronology secondary. The target audience is prepped to jump about and cheer in spite of itself --to be fair, this is equally true with many a Hollywood blockbuster --and so will not realize there’s an awful lot less in Death Note than meets the eye. 

(Released by Viz Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)