VIOLENT COP (SONO OTOKO, KYOBO NI TSUKI)(director: Takeshi Kitano; screenwriter: Hisashi Nozawa; cinematographer: Yasushi Sakakibara; cast: Takeshi Kitano (Azuma), Hakuryu (Kiyohiro), Maiko Kawakami (Akari), Shiro Sano (Police Chief Yoshinari), Shigeru Hiraizumi (Iwaki), Mikiko Otonashi (Iwaki's Wife), Ittoku Kishibe (Nito), Shirô Sano (Yoshinari), Makoto Ashikawa (Kikuchi), Ken Yoshizawa (Shinkai), 1989-Japan)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
A dirtier version of Dirty Harry, to be sure, if that is possible to believe, as Azuma (Takeshi Kitano) is the lone detective who takes the law into his own hands against a yakuza organization and a corrupt police force pushing drugs, while protecting his wayward sister Akari (Maiko) from her tendency to go out with the wrong boy, a gang rape, and her drug addiction.
This directorial debut for Kitano (Hana-Bi/Sonatine) is a visual stunner in unmitigated violence. The "Violent Cop" is as violent and gratuitously violent of an entertaining film as I have ever seen. The audience gets a chance to watch Kitano smash punks around who would probably get away with their crimes or never receive their proper punishment, and the viewer sees an angry cop who is psychotic in his approach to his job, unrelenting in using his fists not his head in getting things squared away with the criminal element. He is also a glutton for punishment as well as in dishing it out.
In the opening scene a group of teenagers beat upon a homeless man and pummel him unconscious, as Azuma comes to the affluent house of one of the punky boys who did this crime and has his mother stay away as he goes up to the kid's room and beats him silly, while he tells him by tomorrow he had better confess in the police station to what he did.
This being the first day on the job for the new pompous police chief (Shiro), who calls Azuma in to berate him for how he got the kid to come down to the police station and confess to the crime. But even as the chief lectures him that he is too wild, he has to admit that he is effective in getting the job done.
The eager rookie police officer Kikuchi (Makoto) is assigned to work with Azuma and tells him that he wants to learn how to be a policeman from him. Azuma takes the up-tight rookie drinking, gambling, and freely borrows money from him. Their first case together is investigating the stabbing death of a lowly drug pusher. This crime will begin to pit the detective against a drug ring supplying local pushers with the drugs, as they are supported by corrupt police, one of them being Azuma's good friend on the vice squad, Iwaki (Hiraizumi).
There will be many twists to the tale, as Azuma, in the conventional part of the story, tracks down all those on the take and who are part of the operation. Finally, he narrows down the gang's enforcer responsible for a string of murders, as someone called Kiyohiro (Hakuryu) and they have a few action-packed face-offs that are bloody and question the officer's ethics as he plants drugs on the gay assassin and tries to kill him while questioning him in the locker room of the police station.
The head of the yakuza organization is a ruthless drug kingpin called Nito (Kishibe), who had hired the sadistic Kiyohiro, ordering him to do two murders for him, a low level drug pusher named Emoto and the corrupt cop, Iwaki, not the extra third one Kiyohiro mistakenly threw in. Taking advantage of the weakness in the yakuza operation, Azuma takes them on single-handedly, as his corrupt superior officers suspend him from the force.
Kitano is overpowering in his mood swings of overbearing silence to emotional tenderness for his unstable sister and then to exhibiting explosive violence against the drug dealers. It's an action flick that questions one's sensibilities and has enough original twists in the story to keep you guessing how many of the cops are corrupt and what method will be used to kill off the yakuza members. There was something very likable about Kitano's monster cop that might be hard to rationalize, but it does draw him close to the audience in a surprising way. If you like your violence with a dose of some intelligent dramatics thrown in for good measure, you should find this flawlessly well-paced film satisfying to some degree. But you better have a strong stomach for violence and how ridiculous this story is, built around titillating the audience with an abnormal display of graphic violence.
REVIEWED ON 11/13/99 GRADE: B
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
http://www.sover.net/~ozus
ozus@sover.net
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ
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