As any TV addict will tell you, there's nothing wrong with watching a cavalcade of hackneyed two-dimensional charicatures march through a series of worn-out cliches, so long as the show contains enough elements that appeal to your taste. Perhaps novel stories and compelling characters are of no interest to you. They are clearly of little interest to the "Gunsmith Cats'" creators, who dutifully use story as a necessary tool with which to string together sharp, popping, shooting-chasing action sequences, and to indulge their passion for girls in panties with guns.
One DVD "behind the scenes" feature relates, in a long yawn, the producers' early business trips to Chicago, where they did thorough location scouting, checked out hot cars, and, of course, spent hours at the shooting ranges "working hard." Corresponding results of this research in "Gunsmith Cats" do impress. The guns and the cars in the show are lovingly drawn in delicate detail. In fact, they sometimes stand out as the most detailed things onscreen, including the characters in and around them. The rich city renderings give a consistent, but layered look to the settings that might have really come to life - if only there were anyone interesting in them.
Equal care surfaces in the flashy action, replete with death defying acrobatics, sharp shooting gunplay, quirky camera angles, and action movie humor. Rally puts bullets in the baddies in quick, sure succession; Minnie May rains down grenades in alarming showers; and they both look good in their underwear. All in all, though sometimes a little stiff, the animation is the strongest leg propping up this flat facade of a show.
No effort goes to explain who any of the characters really are, where they came from, or where they're hoping to go. There is no evidence that they're going anywhere; they're the same people at the end of the show as at the beginning, only some are dead and some in jail. They are scripted by the numbers: Bill is the rogue cop with the heart of gold. His boss, Chief Black, is gruff, yells a lot, and at the appropriate moment suspends Bill for being such a rogue cop. Natasha "The Bloody Pierce" Radinov is the cold-blooded Russian assassin who just loves to kill people in exchange for drugs. The laundry list goes on, culminating in Rally and Minnie May, our reluctant heroines: hot, deadly, full of quips and otherwise undefined.
To sum up, like I said, Gunsmith Cats is no worse than a lot of things on TV. The tag line goes like this: "Stave off a few hours of creaking boredom with the machismo of the Gunsmith Cats! 'Gunsmith' Cats shoots for mediocrity and hits - Bulls-eye!!!"
