Violent Cop [Sono otoko, kyôbô ni tsuki] ***** (1989, Takeshi Kitano, Maiko Kawakami, Makoto Ashikawa, Shirô Sano) – Classic Movie Review 6527

Takeshi Kitano’s highly promising director debut shows much of the sharp and quirky style that was to come to its acme in Sonatine (1993). Kitano’s taut and exciting 1989 Japanese film has a relentless pace that suddenly breaks for flashes of bitter comedy or explosions of edge-of-seat action.

Kitano’s moody, existential cop thriller centres on a Japanese-style Dirty Harry kind of cop called Detective Azuma (Beat Takeshi) who meets violence with violence in Tokyo. This battered but impassive rogue hero confronts a vicious Yakuza when he tries to save his friend, Iwaki (Sei Hiraizumi), a bent cop embroiled in drug dealing and organised crime.

The ‘violent cop’ goes haywire from the film’s first sequence when he avenges himself on a youth who has attacked an old man to the final bloodbath when he takes on the drugged villains who have kidnapped and raped his sister.

Violent Cop is a scary movie about violence with loads of it on show, with the hero at least as worrying as the baddies. Kitano pulls off a clever trick of making his movie stylised and realist at the same time. It is serious stuff, inhabiting ground somewhere between Le Samourai and Dirty Harry. The physically ordinary looking and impassive Beat Takeshi is mighty impressive, flaring suddenly from inscrutable calm to a killing machine.

Also in the cast are Maiko Kawakami, Makoto Ashikawa and Shirô Sano.

It is written by Hisashi Nozawa, shot by Yasushi Sakakihara and scored by Daisake Kume and Eric Satie.

Takeshi Kitano followed it with Sonatine (1993), Kids Return (1996) and Hana-Bi [Fireworks] (1997).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 6527

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