‘Sakamoto Days’ is a faithful adaptation, rather than a good one
“Sakamoto Days,” Yuto Suzuki’s manga series about a former hitman running a suburban convenience store, was one of the big hits of the pandemic era. Having already spawned an animated series that became one of Netflix's most-watched anime in 2025, a live-action version was probably only a matter of time.It’s also perhaps predictable that the assignment would fall to Yuichi Fukuda, the go-to guy for manga adaptations requiring a surfeit of silliness. The writer and director is a proven box-office hitmaker, most notably with the “Gintama” films (2017-18), though to my mind he’s never surpassed the lowbrow delights of the first “HK: Forbidden Super Hero” movie (2013).The source material for “Sakamoto Days” isn’t as gag-heavy as either of those properties, mind you. While Fukuda still finds space for some of his trademark ad-libbed dialogue and cameos by regular collaborators, this is a relatively orthodox affair, which compresses the first few volumes of the manga into a digest that might just about make sense to new initiates.
