ADRENALINE DRIVE (ADORENARIN DORAIBU)
Reviewed by Harvey Karten Shooting Gallery Film Series Director: Shinobu Yaguchi Writer: Shinobu Yaguchi Cast: Ishida Hikari, Ando Masanobu, Jovi Javi
Sociologists theorize that money does not really change people. They point to lottery winners especially from the working class, many of whom still live in the same ordinary neighborhoods, keep their regular jobs, and take the usual domestic vacations. In the long run, maybe money does not buy happiness, though the jury's still out, but in the short run big bucks can change lives. This seems to be what filmmaker Yaguchi Shinobu believes as he looks into the transformation of two young, shy Japanese people living in a regional area of the country. In a film that is part of the famed Shooting Gallery series--which brought us "Croupier," one of the most intense films of the year--Shinobu has fun by pitting some silly members of the yakuza (the Japanese mafia) against two naifs on the run with the dough. The fortunes of the two young protagonists bob up and down, and while they are fond of their yen, their yen for each other is left adorably incomplete.
Suzuki (Ando Masanobu) and Shizuko (Ishida Hikari) start off as strangers but are remarkably alike. Both suffer from inarticulateness. They seem doomed to lives of quiet desperation. Suzuki works for a rental car agency and is regularly harassed by his boss, who is eager to provoke a reaction. Shizuko, a bespectacled and dateless nurse, does not join in the usual girl talk of her two co-workers at the general hospital, presumably because she's not currently dating. When Suzuki runs into a yakuza car, he is hauled by a tall, lanky gangster, Kuroiwa (Kazue Tsunogae) to the thug's operations office when a gas explosion kills everyone but Suzuki and the almost fatally injured Kuroiwa. Brought into an ambulance by Shizuko together with the 200 million yen of gang money, Suzuki is thrown out of the vehicle together with the nurse and the money while Kuroiwa careens into a river. The shy twosome run away with the yen pursued by six punks (the comic Jovi Jova team) and later by Kuroiwa.
This Japanese version of a road-and-buddy movie combined with a comic gangster motif is hampered by poor production values. Little use is made of the regional Japanese scenery, which looks faintly like what can find in any developed country, and the pale color of photographer Takashi Hamada's film casts a generic, washed-out look throughout indoor and outside panoramas. The chase scenes could come out of any Three Stooges movie, mixing the usual conventions of the genres with the obligatory coincidences.
The young couple are attractive and undergo a thorough transformation that's credible enough, but there's little going on that we haven't seen before in any number of such works despite Shinobu's underlying purpose: to delve into the ways that sudden wealth alters everything and yet may not necessarily lead to thoroughly blissful unions. Considering the wondrous luck of the couple, they fight virtually from the beginning, their potential as a couple in doubt. Yaguchi displayed more imagination in his "My Secret Cache", involving a woman who falls into a crater with her stash of stolen money only to be flushed out to pursue the lost cash.
Not Rated. Running time: 111 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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