A.D. Police: To Protect and Serve

AD Police Files: To Protect and Serve (1999): 4/10: After greatly enjoying AD Police Files (1990) I was looking forward to this updated series. What a disappointing mess.

The first disk is a repetitive find malfunctioning robot (In the series they are called Voomers but trust me they are simply robots), Shoot said robot (one bullet usually does the trick) Find new malfunctioning robot. (This town doesn't need the AD Police it needs the consumer protection agency)

Actual plot doesn't rear its head for half a dozen episodes and when it does it's a sleeper. The villain is right out of Batman complete with silly explosives designed to look like toys and a big secret. There is a double-crossing love interest with a big secret. There is a guy who endlessly shows pictures of his kids and how he is going to retire soon (No secret what happens to him.) There is a big company that owns everything. (Gee you think they have a big secret.)

You can see the secrets a mile away and the entire plot reminds me of the background story on a third rate Playstation game. (Think Twisted Metal not Final Fantasy) The show also demonstrates some of the sloppiest police work around. (If your going to arrest a subject under surveillance shouldn't you cut off the exits first?) Also the characters seem to drink at Leaving Las Vegas levels (one entire episode takes place entirely at the bar.)

The voice work on the dub is surprisingly good but the animation is the last straw. Done in that Ken Burns style (pan the photo as substitution for action) it is cheap and like the show itself repetitive.

I'll admit I watched all twelve episodes as they are short and I really hoped for a good payoff at some point. I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone else take the same plunge.

I consider myself a very generous rater as I can usually find something entertaining about virtually every movie or series I watch, but "A.D. Police" is simply terrible with almost no redeeming qualities.

Whatever potential "A.D. Police" might have had is buried under a mountain of weak art, poor animation, hackneyed dialogue, and terrible to the point of being nonsensical episodes, the likes of which you might expect from the worst of what was produced in the '70s or early '80s, but this came out in 1999: Nine years after "A.D. Police Files" (of which it is a spin-off of), and a full decade after "Bubblegum Crisis" (which "A.D. Police Files" is a prequel to).

A typical episode has roughly five minutes or less of either a single "tentacled" robot (called "boomers") gone wild or a dozen machine-gun toting boomers shooting hundreds of rounds but never hitting anything which the two main A.D. Police will take out with a single shot from their ordinary pistols, and as bad as that sounds, it's almost preferable to the failed attempts at character and plot development that fill up the rest of each episode.

If you have the misfortune of having purchased "A.D. Police", save yourself the torture of watching it all the way through and skip to episode nine as virtually the entire story is told in the last third of the series and the attempts at character and plot building in the first two thirds are not essential viewing. Also, in case you were wondering, you might as well watch it dubbed because the Japanese voice acting is no better than the substandard English dub, and reading the English subtitles only emphasizes just how bad the dialogue really is.

The extras provided in the ADV 2001 2-disc DVD release include textless opening and ending videos, production sketches and artwork, trailers, and production notes which are actually worth reading before you watch the series (except for a single spoiler which you are warned about before it's shown to you) as they provide some clarity about the setting.

this series isn't given nearly enough credit. as a spin-off from Bubblegum Crisis, it involves the AD police fighting "boomers" - rogue robots, and revolves around an elite unit. it tends to focus more on character development, although there is plenty of action, and the plot that spans the entire series will leave you both sad and happy at the end.