Resuming his private investigation practice after eradicating his potential arch nemesis, crime lord Hakuro, at the end of "Goku I," Goku accepts an assignment from a sorrowful, fading beauty Yoshiko. She asks him to help her track down and save her escaped brother, Ryu, before the military, which has been performing unimaginable biomechanical procedures on him, kills their botched experiment.

His humanity slipping, Ryu bounds into the Department of Defense to destroy the people that turned him into a monster. Hakuro has an anti-reactant that could save him. However, by the time she and Goku reach him, he's too far-gone to ever regain his identity. As Ryu descends further into his primal rage, Goku becomes more of a machine to beat him.

Goku finds himself in a race against time as the government closes in and questions arise about Yoshiko's true motives.

Where the first "Goku" attempts to deliver a haunting elegy on the separation between man and God, depicting a place where technology becomes so fused with humanity that good and evil fade, the second draws more derivatively from the franchise's cyber-punk roots, dishing out bio-mechanical experiments, biker gangs, punk cuts, a ruthlessly evil fascist villain and enough hard-boiled one-liners to make Arnold Schwarzenegger blush.

But where the "Goku's" god-like, enhanced abilities made everything all too easy to overcome, the P.I.'s prey in this installment is equipped with psycho-kinetic powers that confound the mere wired technology of Goku's cybernetic eye. One of the street punks even refers to Ryu as the devil, a fitting counter to Goku's self-described God-like abilities. The two represent ideological opposites - a concept that may rescue "Goku II" from being just another action flick.

However, the role of villain, now that the city's major crime lord found eternal peace, falls on the only other superpower left in this glistening metropolis - the government. An enigmatic military officer follows Ryu's trail of destruction, dropping plot point explanations like the best villain Bond ever faced.

Still, the mystery behind Goku's acquisition of this special eye remains just that, suggesting that another installment might reveal the origin of the mysterious voice.

Director Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll, Wicked City) stirs a fresh amount of new ideas into this dark, stylized work, spawned from a dark mind. But the grander themes inevitably give way to contrivance and the emergence of a bad guy vs. a good guy.

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