Infamousta brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Manthast Absolutely amazing

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Allissa .Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

JLRVancouver Like most of the other reviewers, I was struck by the similarities between this Japanese crime thriller, clearly modeled after 1950's American film noir, and Sergio Leone's iconic 'spaghetti' westerns. Briefly, hitman Shuji Kamimura (Joe Shishido) and his assistant Shun Shiozaki (Jerry Fujio) are hired to assassinate a yakusa boss only to be betrayed by their employer. On the run, they hole up in a seedy hotel, where Kamimura attracts the eye of former mob moll Mina (Chitose Kobayashi) who agrees to user her connections in the local merchant fleet to help them escape. The mob closes in and Kamimura has to make some tough decisions. Joe Shishido is very good in an atypical way as the impassive contract killer, as is the rest of the cast (especially Kobayashi), and the story moves along at a brisk pace to a satisfyingly bloody conclusion. The black and white cinematography is striking and, while the look is pure noir, the score is an unusual (but effective) mix of discordant jazz (typical of period crime thrillers) and music that is clearly an imitation of (or homage to) Ennio Marricione's iconic spaghetti-western themes. The climatic shoot-out, despite being fought between dapper Japanese gangsters, could have come from a '60's anti-hero western, with a stark landfill site substituting for the desert and choreographed gunplay featuring a variety of weapons and a number of ways to die. This was my introduction to the Japanese crime film (having run out of kaiju and tokusatsu films) and I was equally entertained and impressed and look forward to watching other films in the canon (many of which, I have noticed, have equally evocative titles).

boblipton Imagine, if you will, that instead of making westerns, Sergio Leone had decided to make crime thrillers on the model of RIFIFI, but set in Japan. That's something like what you get here. Jô Shishido is a hit man hired to kill a rival crime boss muscling in on other territory. While waiting for his flight out of town, the dead man's son shows up and offers to make a deal for the assassin's head. Jules Dassin might want us to think there is honor among thieves, but Leone never would, and neither does the director of this movie, Takashi Nomura.It had a deliberately 1950s 'B' movie look, with its b&w photography and "stolen shot" camerawork, but the constantly moving camerawork and stunt gags are clear signs that this is serious film making.... and talented, too; Nomura is not that well known, but this is a good flick. Harumi Ibe's soundtrack starts out sounding like Morricone, but then switches to jazz arrangements for the crime story.

loader898 CHIPMUNK. The lead actor looks like a chipmunk. It needs too be said because that's all you see initially. Apparently it was a result of cheek surgery.Once you get past that this movie is a little treat. A Noir/Yakuza/Spaghetti Western mash-up that actually works. Like "The Killers" we are in the company of a two-man hit team. With a tricked-out car complete with a massive two-way radio they are much in demand from the Yakuza. Then the job goes wrong and it's time to get out of town. However there's a gal at the motel who complicates matters.The music is a combination of cool jazz (which could be in a contemporary Caine movie ) and a touch of the Morricones for the cowboy-like action sequences. It shouldn't work but it is really effective.

RResende There was a lot going on in film world at the beginning of the 60′. The french critics (re)defined how we should see films: the idea that film is unlike literature or other art forms, and has rules of its own: visual narrative. Thus when we look today at the work of people like Hitchcock or Depalma, we can look at what they are doing, in the eye, although the stories they use to hang their visual ideas are (from a literature point of view) empty.Truffaut/Godard went further ahead and became filmmakers, playing and poking fun at American stereotypes, specially the gangster film (the hat, the smoke style basically).At the same time something even more interesting to me was happening in Italy, where western was being reworked, with irony and love, by a few Italians, led masterfully by Leone. The dollars films killed any chance we had to ever look at a classic western without clearly understanding how crooked is the whole Ford/Wayne concept of good/evil, and how prejudiced can pop culture actually be (Spielberg made recently a Ford inspired Bridge of Spies which, after the Iraq war, is still more offensive).The fun thing is that Leone, soaked in westerns and American pop culture (the guy grew literally in Cinecittà) got his lessons from Japan. The first dollars film is a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo.So this fun film closes the circle: a Japanese film which incorporates notions of American gangster films filtered through new wave french irony, and places the thing in a western context, taking the pace from Leone (and the music from Morricone), who himself went to Japan to start his adventure as a director. It really is fun just to get the references straight...