Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Bumpy Chip It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

SnakesOnAnAfricanPlain Bizarre hardly begins to describe this peculiar offering. Tamura is a divorced company employee about to embark on a new venture with his company. Suddenly is sweetheart is found murdered and he's the prime suspect. Did I mention that Tamura is a koala? No? Oh! The fact that he is a koala doesn't seem to have any bearing on the plot at all. It's more of a strange distraction from the films inability to focus. By the time it gets to amnesia, implanted memories, and a shady past, it is all a bit too much. Certainly enjoyable at times, but when switching from dreamlike martial art sequences and axe murder, you can't really fathom what it's aiming to do.

poe426 While CALAMARIE WRESTLER wasn't one of my favorite movies, it wasn't unwatchable, either; EXECUTIVE KOALA, on the other hand, happens to be one of the funniest movies I've seen in quite some time. A grex of, say, David Lynch's RABBITS, Peter Jackson's MEET THE FEEBLES, and GREG THE BUNNY (who prefers the term "fabric-American" or "muppet-American" or somesuch designation to being called a "puppet"), EXECUTIVE KOALA features a salary man who just happens to be a koala bear. Though there's no pandaring here, EXECUTIVE KOALA is the kind of kid's movie kids LOVE. Sure, it's a murder mystery and our hero's in a bit of a pickle, but kids also happen to love HOODWINKED; 'nuff said? Or IS it...? "It's not black and white," one detective tells Tamura (the title character): "It's GRAY- like a koala." Tamura's blackouts leave him a bit flustered as to his whereabouts on the night of the murder: is he innocent, or is he being given the old GASLIGHT treatment? "You're as normal as the next koala," his psychiatrist tells him. EXECUTIVE KOALA is a psykoalagical thriller to rival the likes of GASLIGHT, SUSPICION, and PSYCHO II (and there's even a very funny homage to John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN) and Momo the squirrel is just too cute for words. Writer-director Minoru Kawasaki has given kids of all ages a glorious gift. Don't miss it.

MisterWhiplash The front of the DVD advertises Executive Koala as being apart of the "Minoru Kawasaki Collection", which made me chuckle twice as, first, I had never heard of him and the DVD assumed he was a director of stature enough to already have a 'collection', and secondly that his collection of films is of the kind of work that makes Japanese entertainment seem as wild and crazy and cute as it is. A sampling of his titles include The Calamari Wrestler, The Rug Cop, and Best Hit! Parade!, and he doesn't seem to be stopping yet, mostly through direct-to-video stuff that Takashi Miike would probably turn down. And with this film he has what is a kind of psycho-Kafka parable with a giant Koala-man fighting for his sanity and justice in a murder case. ... Yeah.Why a giant Koala? Hey, why the hell not? I love that the director doesn't really explain that there is a giant Koala-Man, nor that his boss is a giant rabbit, nor that there is a small role for a giant Frog who works at a convenience store. Everyone else in the film is human, and with the exception that the Koala is suspected of murdering a girl, and then possibly his ex-wife, or maybe more than that stemming from a childhood of evil, no one takes him being a Koala as not normal. It's just one of those 'things' in Japan, as if the mentality of the Muppets is so straightforward for them, albeit in this case in a dark-comedy-thriller context where the Koala goes insane with red-eyes and KILLS KILLS like a robot.The film grows to be a big entertainment mostly near the end with a big climactic fight that had me and my friends howling with laughter and cheering. Up until then, it has a curious disposition: it is funny, yes, but it also 'tries' to be funny in some ways that don't work, except maybe in some inside-joke way that Japansese would get and Western audiences would feel out of the loop. But the film has a great charm to it, and knows what it is enough to poke fun at itself (i.e. those flashback scenes the Koala has with his 'romance' stuff), and actually gets oddly dark when the Koala is sent to prison(!) in a fake Alcatraz scenario where he's bullied by everybody else.Executive Koala is recommendable to certain movie buffs. It's not a movie you tell your mother to watch unless she happens to have an affinity for weird anthropomorphic stories of corporate and psychological horror. But if you're hanging out with friends and want that next rush of crazy-Japanese filmmaking (or for Japan is, um, just another Thursday), it's fun and different. And the Koala-man is actually a good actor! I would credit him but IMDb doesn't provide any names for anyone (perhaps due to it being an anonymity thing, or just because of laziness).

iandaemon I have no idea why people say ''Executive Koala'' is hard to understand. Almost everything is explained, bluntly, and the story is pretty linear. Aside from being unfinished, this movie is pretty simple. Described as a ''psychological thriller wrapped up in the packaging of a nonsense comedy--with giant animal characters'', I expected this to be humorous, at least slightly. No. ''Executive Koala'' wasn't even humorous accidentally! (Well, I guess if you find ax murder hilarious it could be.)So it's not funny. But this is supposed to be a convoluted storyline that (in the words of one reviewer) ''...changes direction frequently, especially in the thirrd act, when the plot changes several times...''. Sorry, it fails there too.I found the plot very linear, the story unfinished, and the movie fairly...simple. There are no ''plot twists and turns'', nothing ''funny'', and definitely nothing nonsensical.In the end,''Executive Koala'' isn't a total waste of time, it's just EXTREMELY misrepresented by its advertising.