Heracin

This Japanese movie is centred around the romance between a young highschool yakuza family heiress and her adult bodyguard disguising himself to protect her at school. If I did not find it boring, I for sure also found the romance icky from start to finish...

I certainly can watch and enjoy a wide variety of romances : from very cute and fluffy to ultra dark and taboo... However, unfortunately it did not work for me here. The romance took the regular shojo road of pretending that problematic stuff are adorable and charming when in fact they were just not. I have nothing against age gap story per se, but here the following combination :
- 10 years gap between the main lead (26 years old) and the female lead (hypothesis of 16 years old as she is in her first year of high school)
- grooming
- overpowering main lead yakuza
was a bit much to sell as "cute". The fact the male lead is also a real jerk sleeping around while pining for the heroine certainly also did not help...Overal that's a lot to take in for the viewer to root for them !!!

Acting was overall average, with male lead being simply a big block of wood! Honestly, if I found him more handsome maybe I would be less severe but well, he is not exactly my style so better acting chops would definitely have helped. Female lead is better but nothing extraordinary...and definitely looking too old for the highschooler role... However, given the plot, I guess it is for the best because otherwise the romance would have felt even more unpalatable.

I would not recommend this to people as I feel there are better high school romance movie out there. In order to work better, the storytelling should either have remove the gap age aspect, either the tone of the movie should have be much darker without the classic shojo style to showcase properly the relationship, the gaslighting, the imbalance in power.