Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards has a delightfully loopy setup, a game cast of actors, and some truly funny slapstick humor packed into a two-hour runtime. But for the vast majority that, it never finds a tone, style, or rhythm that works.

Instead, it comes off as a well-intentioned live-action recap of the manga it's based on, effectively just putting in everything from the 48 released chapters, regardless if they fit or not.

The setup is as weird as you'd expect. The titular Honeko has a 10 billion yen bounty on her head. Her childhood friend, who is also madly in love with Honeko, vows to protect her, only to discover all her classmates are secretly covert bodyguards as well. On top of normal high school drama, including melodramatic breakups and rivalries, they have to deal with seemingly superpowered killers, the Yakuza, and Honeko's hidden past.

As a manga, the storytelling works quite flawlessly. Every new group of killers starts a fresh arc, during which the students work out their differences while kicking butt in a spectacular fashion. In the film, it leads to a series of sudden stops and starts, as if we're watching seasons of a TV series in a sped up montage.

The cast, luckily, is so game to the silliness that they almost make the whole thing worthwhile. Raul Murakami, playing Honeko's lovelorn protector Ibuki, has a great straight man quality to him. He anchors the madness just enough that when he also goes off the rails, you know things have truly escalated beyond insanity.

Another standout is the great Tao Tsuchiya as Masachika Jingu, who pines after Ibuki. She's a terrifying force on the battlefield, who turns into a bumbling and insecure mess when forced to deal with personal issues. Tsuchiya is easily the MVP of the film, delivering a hysterically funny slapstick performance that is both physical and surprisingly nuanced.

Sadly, despite these highlights and a couple of great action sequences, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards never settles into a rhythm that makes for fun viewing. Director Jun'ichi Ishikawa frames everything as if it were an anime, but doesn't account for the fact that in anime movements can be exaggarated in ways they can't in live-action. This leads to odd framing and the actors putting on a pantomime without any of the flair they'd need to sell the illusion.

Then, because the film tries to cram in everything from the serialized manga, there's the wildly convoluted plot that needs explaining every ten minutes or so. Again, in a TV series you could get away with recaps, but in a film it just starts to grate when everything stops so the characters can reiterate what happened in the previous scene.

There's a fun mini-series buried in here, somewhere, and I'd love to see it edited into something like that. As a film, it's just too busy and too stuffed to work, and it tests the audience's patience more than once with its twists and turns.

If you're already a fan of the manga and can't wait to see your favorite characters in live-action, you'll probably get a bit more out of the adaptation. For everyone else, Honeko AKabane's Bodyguards is sadly an easy film to miss, especially considering how many better manga adaptations are out there just at Fantasia Festival alone.