Cast:
Takeshi Kitano (Azuma), Maiko Kawakami (Akari), Makoto Ashikawa (Kikuchi), Shirō Sano (Yoshinari), Sei Hiraizumi (Iwaki), Mikiko Otonashi (Iwaki's wife), Hakuryu (Kiyohiro), Ittoku Kishibe (Nito), Ken Yoshizawa (Shinkai), Nobuyuki Katsube (Deputy Police Chief Higuchi), and Akira Hamada (Chief Detective Araki) Directed by Takeshi Kitano.
Review:
"My advice is: trust nobody. Don't listen to what anybody has to say, just stick to your guns and trust your instincts. If you start to listen to people and put their ideas in your first movie, then you'll have to compromise more on your second, and it will just get worse and worse from there. You can always listen to advice on your third or fourth film, but on your first, stick to your guns. Just be prepared to be labeled a "box office unfriendly" director, like I used to be, if you do this."
Tell me if this sounds familiar: actor-turned-filmmaker. Okay, that's a simplification, but how else does one start talking about Takeshi Kitano? Born in Adachi, Tokyo, Kitano actually started his studies at Meiji University for engineering before he dropped out, finding his first path as a comedian. He became a theater MC and later formed a comedy duo as "Beat Takeshi" with Niro "Beat" Kaneko (hence the duo name of Two Beat). Eventually, he struck out on his own to do appearances on television (such as the game show Takeshi's Castle and, I'm not kidding, designing a video game) and then tried to branch out into film with Nagisa Ōshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983). When he went to a screening and heard people burst out laughing, he found himself devastated but also determined to continue to play serious characters in film and TV. In a filmmaking career of over three decades, Violent Cop, his debut film as a director, is the only film he did not have a writing credit for and one of just two where he did not serve as editor, which has seen films such as the comedy Getting Any? (1995), the crime drama Hana-bi (1997), the one-time American production with Brother (2000), the lyrical drama Dolls (2002), the action film Zatōichi (2003), and his most recent film, Broken Rage (2024) to go along with his continued work in television (he has been quoted as stating that doing shows helped in his filmmaking in terms of the pursuit of knowledge).
Apparently, the original plans were to make a movie adaptation of a non-fiction novel (about insurance fraud) called Travelers of the Southern Cross with Kinji Fukasaku* as director and Kitano as one of the leading roles. Apparently, an incident involving Kitano storming a scandal magazine spurred curiosity to have Kitano not just be in the film but play a detective once delays from the fallout of, well, stumbling onto a building with a "gang" because a gossip magazine wrote about them. Fukasaku's disagreements with the producer over the scheduling and tone led to the idea of Kitano doing both direction and starring, complete with freedom to do what he could, complete with doing re-writes on the original script (as done by Hisashi Nozawa, who later took his original script and turned it into a novel). Kitano has been quoted saying that he wanted to show violence as the horrifying thing that it is rather than say, as one to be glamorized or depicted as inevitable. Basically, you get a movie from someone who is making their first steps of a worldview involving bleak surroundings, long takes that leave the viewer in a sort of a stasis for what they are seeing and a generally resigned nature to what will end up on screen in terms of violence that is as swift as it is startling. It might not exactly be a great movie, but it does manage to have enough to make the 103 minutes manage to work in the stone-faced chaos that ensues from people that essentially has no qualms about having no heroes. The violence that comes out from Kitano paired with the middling amount of resistance from the authority around him (consider how he mostly writes apology notes) is there because that's just how the wind blows in "life going on". It isnt exactly the Japanese Dirty Harry, you know. One minute you could be at the theater with a friend and the next minute, a mishap leaves someone splattered onto the floor. You get a chase scene with a bit of jazz poured in to go along with plenty of running for a movie that really could only end one way in the circle of violence. People live, people die, and the cop machine (vice or otherwise) moves on. As a whole, Violent Cop is a shaky but curiously enjoyable experience that is worth seeing further with Kitano as a filmmaker in looking upon violence and the people that inhabit that world.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
*You might wonder, hey, is Kinji Fukasaku part of New Directors Month? Surprisingly, he actually has been covered before because he directed Message from Space (1978) that we covered years ago. But there are films one (i.e., me) should probably check out such as Battle Royale (2000) or the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series of films (1973-1976). Incidentally, Kitano ended up working with Fukasaku on Battle Royale.
No comments:
Post a Comment