I can’t find the image now, but just after the Avengers Endgame opening weekend, one of my friends shared an image of the top movie in various countries. Endgame topped them all – except in Japan, where the number one movie was Detective Conan: Fist of the Blue Sapphire.

If the fact that Detective Conan managed to top Endgame in Japan wasn’t a big enough of a draw, the fact that it’s set in Singapore for the first time (also the first time a Detective Conan movie is set outside of Japan) meant that me watching the movie was inevitable.

Every time I watch a Detective Conan movie, it just seems to get more and more ridiculous. In the first five minutes of Fish of the Blue Sapphire, we have a murder, a mini-explosion at Marina Bay Sands, and the Merlion spewing blood. And that is not the most unrealistic series of scenes in the movie. Poor Conan, smuggled into Singapore by Kaito Kid, is drawn into a series of murders which point towards the most unlikely of culprits – Kaito Kid himself.

Oh, and Makoto Kyogoku (Sonoko’s boyfriend who’s always somewhere fighting/training for a fight) is there too. He was invited to take part in a martial arts tournament, where the grand prize is a belt embedded with the Fist of the Blue Sapphire. Obviously, this is related to the murders as well.

This was an insanely fun movie. The fact that Kaito Kid is in there helps (I always feel that episodes with him tend to be a bit more on the comedic side) but lots of the movie was just so unrealistic that I ended up in stitches. The final, climactic fight scene had me laughing the whole way through, but to be honest, that just made the movie more endearing to me. And of course, there were lots of intentionally comedic moment – my favourite has got to be the one where Sonoko continually praises Kaito Kid, oblivious to a jealous Makoto.

And of course, I cannot stress how happy I was to see Singapore in the movie. I was already excited when they were inspired by Singapore in The Darkest Nightmare (the 2016 movie) so obviously actually having parts of Singapore featured was amazing. Apart from the Marina Bay Sands area and the Merlion, I also saw Maxwell Market, parts of Chinatown/Telok Ayer area, and NUH.  It’s pretty much Singapore through a tourist’s lens (there are absolutely no Singaporean accents in the movie – presumably because that would make it hard for non-Singaporeans to hear) but it’s a fun portrayal. I was also impressed by the amount of English in the movie; apart from key dialogue, most of the background conversations were in English.

I would definitely, one hundred percent recommend this. It’s a fun movie, and thankfully features characters who appear relatively early in the series, so even if you haven’t been keeping up with the last two hundred episodes or so, you’ll probably be familiar with all the main characters.