Most anime, especially those from the 80s got a major mauling from companies rolling over themselves trying to get them into English. Nowadays, dubbing is much better and normally exactly the same as the subtitled screenplay, but back around '89-'96 it was a different matter, and anime was viewed mainly as fodder for action movie buffs and cyberpunks, so it was dubbed as so. Didn't matter how sensitive the original was, the western version sounded like Die Hard. With more swearing. I start with this anecdote because Angel Cop is so bad, the cheesy and unnecessarily vulgar 80s dubbing is the least of its problems.
Even in the original Japanese, Angel Cop would have still limped in over the finish line somewhere around the 99th place mark. The animation is so unnervingly rigid and stagnant it makes La Jetee look action-packed, the character design makes it almost impossible to discern what gender characters are without looking at their chest or waiting for their first line of hideously cheap, unpleasant dialogue, and it manages to pretty much clinch the victory for the most vile main character in history with the titular Angel.
Angel makes Bad Leutenant look like Willy freaking Wonka. This woman is mean, unpleasant and difficult to get along with from the get-go. When she's not indiscriminately shooting anyone not in a police uniform Death Wish style, she's either espousing patriotic garbage about how great the government in her society is, or she's yelling at people for no obvious reason. Dysfunctional characters are one thing, but Angel is about as much fun to spend screen-time with as a bad case of the mumps.
That's pretty much enough to wreck it, given that all movies and TV series need a key character or two you can relate to, but there's more. The plot is awful, a generic Z Grade political thriller come Blade Runner rip-off that should have been shot by snipers as it attempted to enter the building. Add to that an alarming level of pointlessly tasteless violence, bad mecha design from the 'I can't be bothered to draw today I'm going to trace Shinji Aramaki's...WHOOPS I SLIPPED' school of production design, and Angel Cop is hobbling down the track with two busted kneecaps. Seriously, avoid this series. Like you'd avoid a giant rat with rabies.
If it serves any purpose to society and culture at all, Angel Cop is a footnote and a dire warning as to how far even generic, lowest-common-denominator anime has come, and how far it potentially has to fall. It's a badly dubbed, nasty, sloppily put together heap of anime waste product, and as such should be avoided as carefully as possible.
Even in the original Japanese, Angel Cop would have still limped in over the finish line somewhere around the 99th place mark. The animation is so unnervingly rigid and stagnant it makes La Jetee look action-packed, the character design makes it almost impossible to discern what gender characters are without looking at their chest or waiting for their first line of hideously cheap, unpleasant dialogue, and it manages to pretty much clinch the victory for the most vile main character in history with the titular Angel.
Angel makes Bad Leutenant look like Willy freaking Wonka. This woman is mean, unpleasant and difficult to get along with from the get-go. When she's not indiscriminately shooting anyone not in a police uniform Death Wish style, she's either espousing patriotic garbage about how great the government in her society is, or she's yelling at people for no obvious reason. Dysfunctional characters are one thing, but Angel is about as much fun to spend screen-time with as a bad case of the mumps.
That's pretty much enough to wreck it, given that all movies and TV series need a key character or two you can relate to, but there's more. The plot is awful, a generic Z Grade political thriller come Blade Runner rip-off that should have been shot by snipers as it attempted to enter the building. Add to that an alarming level of pointlessly tasteless violence, bad mecha design from the 'I can't be bothered to draw today I'm going to trace Shinji Aramaki's...WHOOPS I SLIPPED' school of production design, and Angel Cop is hobbling down the track with two busted kneecaps. Seriously, avoid this series. Like you'd avoid a giant rat with rabies.
If it serves any purpose to society and culture at all, Angel Cop is a footnote and a dire warning as to how far even generic, lowest-common-denominator anime has come, and how far it potentially has to fall. It's a badly dubbed, nasty, sloppily put together heap of anime waste product, and as such should be avoided as carefully as possible.