I really wanted to like this movie

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2015)

I really wanted to like this movie, I heard from everyone that it was an anime classic and I had seen screenshots that looked really cool. In the end I was disappointed.
The movie was hand drawn and it looked amazing no doubt about that, I could stare at still from this movie all day long, it's the other things that bothered me.
The story is a mess. I loved the first act, seeing this cyberpunk city was really cool, seeing the gangs and everything. After that the movie turned into a anime horror movie, which I don't feel fit the tone at all. The whole Akira thing was confusing as hell, they never explained it, everyone was asking the whole movie "What is Akira?" The third act dragged out so much, things that were happening didn't make sense at all. The end was just a mess with destruction everywhere, but no story to tell about it.
The soundtrack was also annoying. Some of the songs were cool, but they play them almost 7 or 8 times in the movie, which wears out the song and just makes it ambient noise.
This might be only the English dub, but the dubbing was horrible. The words were off the mouth movements and the voice actors were bad. In intense scenes the voice actors never gave an intense feel.
For a classic there were some big problems. The story could have been more direct and made more sense. In fact, they could have just made the movie about the city and the gangs fighting and that would have made it better. With the movie how it is, they could have cut it down to take out the dragging on of the end. Akira just ended up losing my interest near the end, making it not as interesting as I thought it would be.