Surprisingly, eX-Driver managed to get a movie, with the uncreatively titled “eX-Driver: The Movie”. And I use the word ‘movie’ in the loosest sense possible, since it’s more like an hour long direct-to-DVD special that managed to get a bump in animation quality.
The movie follows the three leads from the series as they enter and win a domestic preliminary round and advance to the eX-Driver world race competition held in Los Angeles as a representative team from Japan. Not long after arriving in LA, an AI car goes haywire, setting off a chain of events that leads out main trio into a conspiracy involving the race competition and some of the people involved with it.
If my reaction to the series was lukewarm at best, the movie doesn’t do much to change that. We don’t even get to see that many differences between how Japan and America deal with how they handle their AI cars, which would have made for some good world building and could have been a neat culture shock for the three main characters, and would have made the movie stand out more by giving it some personality.
Like I mentioned earlier, the animation is a step up from the series, but unfortunately it still has some of the early 2000s CGI used for the cars. To be fair, it’s not the worst CGI that I’ve seen from the era, and is a bit better than the series, but it might turn some people off who aren’t use to seeing older CGI.
But that’s not all, because on the same day that the movie was released, a short called “eX-Driver: Nina & Rei – Danger Zone”, which was featured as a bonus on the same DVD as the movie, and is a prequel to the series featuring two minor characters, who are the top eX-Driver team.
I’m going to include this as part of my review for the movie because I still want to talk about it, but I don’t think I can justify a whole review for it, especially since it’s only 24 minutes long, and doing a stand alone review with a minimum character/word limit would be stretching it out to the breaking point.
The plot focuses on a mysterious mini-AI car that terrorizes the city, and it’s up to Nina and Rei to stop it, all while having to deal with something or someone from the eX-Driver's past.
Out of the entire series, this is the most entertaining entry. The whole thing felt like an homage to an 80s or 90s buddy cop action movie, with the angry police chief cliche and everything. The villain for this special was also pretty fun, and I’m not going to spoil it.
This OVA wasn’t anything special, but compared to the rest of the series, it at least feels like there was an attempt made to make something at least fun, even if it ended up being to late into the series for someone to care about it outside of the dedicated fans or people who like to check out everything.
If anything, you could probably watch this without knowing anything about the rest of the series, and you would have to only spend 24 minutes at most to watch it.
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