Well, I'm lying. For those of you who don't know, Takeshi Kitano is a japanese superstar. He was a comedian who became a TV celebrity as "Beat" Takeshi, the host of one of those wacky Japanese shows that made people do weird stunts and undergo cruel pranks for money. Then he became a newspaper columnist and TV talk show host. He started writing and directing his own movies back in 1992, and had a rough year in '94 or thereabouts where he almost died in a motorcycle accident. I saw "Violent Cop," his first movie, and was stunned by it. He is one of the stars of Gonin, filmed right after his motorcycle accident (the eyepatch that he wears is real), and, although he was not writing and directing it, I rushed off to see it as soon as I got back from Vegas. Anyway, the man is so cool and charismatic, I can actually understand what those who saw Eastwood for the first time back in the 60's in Fistful of Dollars must have been experiencing, and after seeing a few more of his movies ("Boiling Point" and the absolutely brilliant "Sonatine"), I swore that I'd see anything he was in. As I said, I'm a liar in a lot of ways.
Kitano went on to appear in "Johnny Mnemonic" the excorciated Keanu Reeves flick that I still haven't seen. I'll catch it someday, because the main Yakuza assassin is "Beat" Takeshi. I also haven't seen "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" (which made "Beat" a big star internationally and actually helped make him a star in Japan after the fact) because it's a war movie with David Bowie, and if there's any genre that rubs me the wrong way, it's the "Pop-Star-Goes-to-War" genre (Bowie in "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence," John Lennon in "How I Won the War," Art Garfunkel in "Catch 22," etc., etc. It's as if Elvis going into the army left a psychic wound on the Hollywood psyche that's been trying to clear ever since).
However, when I saw an ad for Gonin I knew that I would see it immediately. "Beat" in a japanese movie, complete with actual eyepatch, partial paralysis and facial twitches? The man is a god. The movie is directed by Takashi Ishii, a Japanese manga writer and artist turned director, which I figured was the next best thing to seeing a movie that Beat had himself written and directed.
Gonin is a movie in the Heist genre, more specifically the Failed Heist genre. In the Failed Heist genre, a bunch of squabbling outsiders get together and plan a nearly impossible heist. Usually, they pull it off, then things unwind from there. Filmmakers love this type of film because it falls so easily into screenwriting's three act structure; Act I, things come together, Act II, things get pulled off, Act III, things come apart. (Yes, by the way, Reservoir Dogs is a failed heist movie, but one that cleverly skips over almost all of Act II and sprinkles the end of it and Act I all throughout Act III, which is where the movie begins. This is why it drives me nuts that Q.T. gets hit with the City on Fire plagarism. If you see a house you like, and build your own house based on that house, and use a lot of the same materials, but build your house so that it's completely upside-down but still cozy and livable and attractive, you should get some points for originality, I think). Gonin follows the traditional structure, but throws in some many loops, narrative kinks, dark humor and cynicism, that you feel like you're watching something completely different.
Koichi Sato plays Bandai, a debt-riddent disco owner, who's borrowed heavily from the Yakuza and starting to sink under. He has some sort of fixation of Mistuya (Masahiro Motoki) who looks at first like an attractive woman who hangs out in the club, but is in fact a male prostitute who's quick with a knife. The first part of the movie starts off very heavily within Sato's head (in fact, the first scne is a dream/flashback sequence filled with laughter, violence and leaking fluids) but expands as he recruits his partners in crime. Bandai's idea is simple and almost suicidal; he intends to rip off the Yakuza headquarters he's been paying.
In most failed heist movies, the ones pulling off the job are outsiders, misfits, fuck-ups, and one of Gonin's strengths lies in making Bandai, Mistuya and the three others he recruits (presumably the five of the title) way more fucked up than just about any band of misfits that you can imagine. Besides Bandai (who we learn is a washed-up pop star) and Mitsuya, there's Hizu (Jimpachi Nezu) a disgraced ex-policeman, Ogiwara (Naoto Takenaka) a cackling businessman who's lost his job, and Jimmy (Kippei Shiina), a former yakuza who seems to be a punch-drunk or alcoholic wreck in love with the Thai prostitute he may or may not be a pimp for. The viewer's compassion for these wounded people comes very cautiously, if at all, and it's obvious that Ishii means for each of the five to represent a different segment of Japanese society dispossessed by the recent recession. Rather than push that idea and making the characters very appealing (which would risk the cheapest sentimental bathos), Ishii makes all of them really cold, distant, bitter, violent or flat-out demented which gives the first two acts a lot of tension, and leaves the third act open in a bit of a gamble; if you don't care about the characters by then, seeing everything fall apart around them won't mean much to you.
Fortunately, you do care about the characters to varying degrees, and so it's all the more awful what they go through in the end. I don't want to give away too much, but let's just say that Gonin starts off with nightmare and then proceeds to become one.
Cold, brutal and compelling, Gonin is also one of the more visually beautiful movies I've seen this year. Batting cages, discos and sites of Japan's recent economic glory are washed in a sickly green; cityscapes at night are bruised blue and black. No matter how tempted one gets to turn away, the lure of seeing is too strong, and Gonin ends up succeeding if for no other reason than the filmmaker creates in the viewer the same desire to see things through to the end that the filmmaker possesses. Gonin will never win anyone's "Feel Good Movie of the Year" endorsement, but I recommend it to anyone who thinks they can take it.
All material on these pages is © 1997 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.