Dangan Runner (1996) * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1999 by Serdar Yegulalp
"Dangan Runner" -- the word "Dangan" means "bullet" -- is one big chase scene played for comic revelation. Like a lot of action movies, there's a climax where everyone's shooting at everyone else -- but in this case, it's played as a tongue-in-cheek piece of black comedy instead of a serious contest of strength.
"Dangan Runner" takes three people whose lives have bottomed out and intertwines them in bizarre ways. Tomoroh Taguchi (the quintessential Japanese cult actor), as Yasuda, is a schlub who can't even hold down a short-order cook job. He tries to rob a bank, but even that collapses when he realizes he's left his face mask at hime -- and the only mask he can find at the corner convenience store (in a hilarious piece of montage) is a children's-sized job. In despair, he tries robbing the place, and winds up shooting the store clerk, Aizawa (Daimond Yukai).
Aizawa has his own problems. He's got a band (and judging from the brief clip we see, where Yukai himself performs, they're pretty good), but he's got a yakuza boss squeezing him for cash, a girlfriend who he doesn't care for, and a drug addiction. When Yasuda shoots him (it isn't much of a wound, actually), Aizawa takes off after him, and they collide with Takeda.
Takeda is a yakuza protector, walking around in a funk because despite his oaths of fealty, he chickened out when someone tried to attack his boss (and let the man get stabbed to death). Aizawa and Yasuda collide with him, and an innocent bystander gets shot as well -- and now Takeda is after *them*. And they run, run, run -- for something like 80% of the running time (pardon the pun) of "Dangan Runner", in a crazy marathon of self-determination. Each of them has a reason to keep going, and pretty soon it becomes all that's holding them together. (There are moments where the "marathon" aspect is explicitly parodied, like when each of them grab free drinks being offered at a promotional stand. But the joke doesn't end there.)
Astute viewers will probably no doubt find similarities between this and "Lola Rennt [Run Lola Run]", but "Dangan Runner" is its own animal, funny and fast-moving. There is a kind of a nod to the parallel-reality jaunting of "Lola" -- in one screamingly funny scene, the three runners jog past a pretty young woman, and each of them entertains varied pornographic fantasies about her. They're not alone in their dreaming, either: the cops and the yakuza have their own hilariously-realized fantasies about how they'd like things to unfold as well.
"Dangan Runner" is not the greatest movie ever made, but at 82 minutes it's tight and fresh. I understand that director Hiroyuki Tanaka is something of a Great White Hope for Japanese film right now, and seeing this movie it's not hard to see why.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews