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March 20, 2005
Branded To Kill on DVD, 3/15/05
I can't believe I've never heard of this movie before. Why didn't someone recommend this earlier?
This is one of those crazy Japanese movies where the plot seems vaguely familiar, but there's some weirdness in the translation, so what probably seems sensical to a Japanese audience plays like one huge mess in America. It begins with the third best assassin in Japan taking an assignment to kill the second best. This actor, Jo Shishido, is most notable for his incredibly square jawline and his puffy chipmunk cheeks. He ends up killing what seems like an army of bad guys and gets involved with a mysterious woman who he fucks. He goes back to his wife and she leaves him when she finds out. He goes back to the mysterious woman who hires him to kill some foreign official, then she gets kidnapped herself by the best assassin in Japan. This new assassin starts tormenting our chubby-cheeked antihero, who begins cracking under the stress of being watched constantly. It all ends at a shoot out in some empty boxing ring.
The plot's definitely noir, but the style is some weirdo cross between noir storylines, German expressionist lighting and Man Ray photos. The violence is so stylized and over the top. The action sequences are inventive, but manic. Our assassin hero shoots a dentist from below through a drain in a sink. There's a lot of violence done to women, but even the men suffer in this mess. The characters do things that make no sense to nonsense and I kept wondering how they even managed to make this movie. The director, Seijun Suzuki, was apparently fired by his studio for deviated from the script. I'm sure the studio had no idea what to do with this twisted little thing, but it was worth it.
Posted by deaconmf at March 20, 2005 01:35 PM
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