This film can definitely leave the viewer with mixed feelings. It was interesting listening to all the interviews with the Tokyo police, and watching how they handled things. Yet you are left wondering if the case was only getting so much attention because of all the pressures from the victim's father, England and the foreign press. Would a Japanese woman's disappearance have gotten so much attention? Obviously not.

Of course, the fact Lucie Blackman was working as a hostess played a part in the original lack of interest from the Tokyo police. The documentary really plays down Ms. Blackman's job, too, making it seem no different than being a waitress or something. It was quite different. Young women flirt and entertain men in the clubs, and can go out with them on paid dinners. There is supposed to be no sex involved, but it's naive to think that never happened and more money was paid.

Lucie Blackman had a stewardess job, but apparently wanted to make more money to pay off debts--a fact the documentary doesn't bring up. Instead, she is presented as a young woman wanting to see the world and experience the fun life in Japan. The Tokyo police apparently ignored reports of crimes from women who worked her job.

Fortunately for all the hostesses in Tokyo, it was the pressured case on Ms. Blackman's disappearance that led to the identity of a horrid wealthy rapist who may have victimized up to 400 women. (The police had gotten complaints about him in the past from some of those victimized and nothing was done.) Unfortunately, this film failed to explain in detail how the rapist was convicted of crimes against other women, but originally found not guilty of any crimes against Lucie Blackman, even though her body was the only one ever found!

I know this story pretty well already, having read a few books on it. Tokyo Hostess, in particular, was well written and gave a lot of detail.

This documentary starts when Lucie has already disappeared, so there is no background to her life in Tokyo and her job working in the hostess club. It suffers greatly for this, as this is what would make the casual viewer care about her story.

Instead, it's her father, who I find seriously arrogant, who is star of this show. Not playing down that he lost his daughter, and obviously what happened to Lucie was evil, but I just couldn't deal with him throwing his weight around in another country. I know this won't be a popular opinion. Reading that he accepted a cash payment in hopes of a reduced sentence from a friend of the killer makes him look even worse, honestly.

Lucie took a silly risk to make easy money (again, in no way makes what happened to her okay). Father has the air of wealth, so not sure why he didn't just fund her holiday instead of letting her do that. Even a safe country has its issues.

There's been a sort of backlash against true crime sensationalism lately, to the sort of degree where there's been an intentional shift towards a focus on the victims of crime rather than the criminals or police. Though even that has gradually started to see this leading to exploitation.

This documentary goes a very odd route by seemingly avoiding the victim to a large degree. Lucie Blackman's disappearance is the driving force here, but from the very start we are essentially following the police and their investigation. We don't know who Lucie Blackman is, what she was doing before she disappeared, who she knew, anything that a typical documentary would, setting up the person, brief backstory, then their disappearance and then the investigation.

Instead we jump straight into the investigation. At the same time, focus is being given to Lucie's father who apparently has to harangue the police into actually investigating this as a crime.

Even from there there's not much actually going on in terms of a narrative here around Lucie Blackman. We're shown her father railing against the cops and their apparent ineptitude but we never actually see or hear how they are mishandling the case at first.

Once the cops start down the case, leads are picked up on and followed but we aren't very clear in terms of how said leads were picked up on and how they even relate to the Blackman case, possibly in large part because we skipped over the basic facts of the case and started the documentary with her already missing and without ever really looking back into the "who what where why how" of her actual disappearance.

This is a documentary, so it's supposed to be informative first, with the entertainment aspect being a sort of uncomfortable pushed-aside element that is implied but never made obvious.

Because of this, it's hard to review a documentary, since critiquing it for being boring or otherwise not entertaining is kind of missing the point and a lot like critiquing the news for constantly moving on to new topics of reporting and discussion.

As a result, my problem with this documentary isn't with the entertainment but with the information given. Namely, we aren't given a lot of information. As mentioned, they start off 3 days after the disappearance, and don't give us the starting facts that almost every missing persons case starts with. As well, when we're being told about certain things, we aren't actually shown enough information that would support what is being shown.

As an example, at one point we are told about a trial and the results of a trial. However we are not given any information as to why the result of the trial ended up how it went, particularly considering that we went along with the discovery of the key bits of evidence with the police. Why did this happen? Why did it fail? From just this documentary alone, we don't know.