Micitype Pretty Good

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

boblipton Jô Shishido is fresh out of prison and is picked to lead a crew in an armored car robbery. He needs the money for an operation for his sister, so he agrees to take on a tough crew. However, things don't go right, and there is betrayal and a chance for vengeance awaiting him.Although the heist is well performed, I found the sheer violence, from beginning to end to be almost a parody of the form. Shishido starts by beating up his potential crewmates in order to establish... that this is one of the Nikkatsu crime thrillers, I suppose, and those are about tough guys committing crimes with plenty of bloodshed. That it does, but it offers little to the genre but Shishido in his typecast screen role, doing more of the same.... an excess rather than an advance and foreshadowing the logical end point of the dramatic form.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD. Restoration = ten (10) stars; subtitles = five (5) stars. Director Takumi Furukawa seems bent on breaking the Guinness Word Record for gun shots fired in a single movie! Just about every scene ends in gun fire (and many also start off with it). Intra- and inter-gang warfare provides the back drop. It looks like every available character actor was rounded up to maximize the body count. Paybacks piled atop paybacks leaves no survivors (which provides quite a nice savings to taxpayers footing the bill for incarcerations!). Acting is okay (lead actor is chubby-cheeked Jou Shishido (who under went plastic surgery to inflate his mouth to look tougher, but, at least to me, just makes him appear as an undisciplined trumpet player!)). Cinematography (wide screen, black and white), scene lighting, editing, body makeup, sound dubbing, and score are all very good. Subtitles are pretty much mandatory due to the heavy use of Kansai Ben line readings and contemporary slang. Unfortunately, translations leave much to be desired. They need a good grammatical scrub (perhaps the translator was an intern not proficient in Western dialects?) to reduce their length so as to increase their time on the screen. Good shoot-em-up ganger film. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

MartinHafer "Cruel Gun Story" stars one of the weirder actors of his era, Jô Shishido. I say weird because Shishido actually paid to have surgery to give him bizarre cheeks--making him appear, somewhat, like a human chipmunk! This apparently made him quite popular in Japanese crime films (I didn't realize that Japanese criminals were cursed with this odd facial characteristic!). I've seen him in quite a few films including: "Branded to Kill", "Youth of the Beast", "Detective bureau 2-3" and "Gate of Flesh" and he is the epitome of Japanese cool.When the story begins, you learn that Shishido's been in prison for killing a man who ran over Sashido's sister. As a result, the sister is wheelchair-bound, so Shishido felt compelled to kill the guy. Now, he's been sprung from prison early--apparently some mob boss wants him lead a team in an armored car robbery. Shishido agrees--as he hopes that the money can pay for some miracle surgery to heal her. Unfortunately, there's more to the plan than Shishido is aware of and perhaps this is NOT a good way to make a fast buck. Can our anti-hero somehow survive this bold caper? I could say more, but it would spoil the film.This is a very taut and exciting crime film thanks to a great plot, good acting and Shishido's character--a nice mixture of coolness, machismo and, in an odd way, honor. Plus, I sure liked the very dark ending--what a finale. Overall, I'd say this is one of the best examples of Japanese noir I have seen and it's well worth seeing--whether or not you are a fan of the genre.

chaos-rampant If you came to the movies in the Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir boxset expecting something like Seijun Suzuki, you will be disappointed. There's a reason Seijun Suzuki has a reputation like he has and there's a reason Nikkatsu fretted with every movie he made and eventually fired him. Suzuki saw Nikkatsu's formula for crime potboilers for what it was and reduced it to the casual. He attacked it. He was the bright exception, and a film like Cruel Gun Story is the formula, the beaten path, and now that the Eclipse box set allows us immediate context, Suzuki seems that much more daring. He was eventually blacklisted for his transgressions for a decade and Nikkatsu staved off bankruptcy until the early 70's, so that's how that cruel story goes.This is the heist film where a crew of low-entry criminals get together for a big job, in this case to rob an armoured car carrying racetrack money. If nothing else, at least the plans in these films are usually elaborate enough to be fun to watch them being hatched, carried out in anxiety, and fail with disastrous consequences. Not so in this case. If a non-writer was given 10 minutes and a napkin to write it down, he could have probably come up with something more plausible/intriguing than this: force armoured car with bulletproof windows to detour into dirt road, ambush, fire at the escorting police motorcycles, then hope the driver and escort inside the car will be stupid enough to run out of the safety of their bulletproof vehicle into the open to be killed and conveniently provide the safe key to the robbers. Mercifully it doesn't work that way; yet to have us a believe the robbers would stage a heist and base it on that improbable chance firmly places Cruel Gun Story in Tintin territory.The only interesting aspect of this is that the robbers are forced to take the van to their hideout with the driver and police escort still inside. A gunfight takes place there, there's a lot of gunsmoke and sparks fly, but that semi-interesting set piece is brought to a screeching halt when someone lights dynamite and throws it inside the warehouse. Of course someone picks it up and throws it back out. It's a like a gagman from the 1920's dropped by the studio the day of shooting the scene and improvised something on the spot.Despite what it says on the tin, these are not noir films. The Japanese did a lot of great things in their postwar cinema, but they didn't understand noir. We get a 'crime doesn't pay' finale to be sure, and if you thought Casablanca was too literal in saying the same thing in its own finale, you have to see the protagonist lying dead on a pile of money catching on fire to realize Michael Curtiz was only too subtle by comparison, but that's not what noir is about. Cruel Gun Story is basically a b/w crime flick where Jo Shishido yells and punches people randomly, someone is betrayed and comes back for revenge, yet there's no fatalism and the noir God who indifferently pulls the strings in a cold yawning universe is conspicuously absent.