LogFAQs > #968698142

plasma
So I watched the first thirty minutes of this one, admitted to myself that I had no clue what was going on, and then decided to start the movie over from the beginning. That turned out to be a good decision.

BWHAH (that acronym looks like a line of Bowsers dialogue btw) does an awful job of easing the viewer in. It unloads a plethora of characters, slaps hasty name cards on each, promises that everybody will become a future criminal underboss, and expects you to recognize whos who once the story gets rolling. I couldnt follow any of it until I restarted the movie and realized this is actually a cool historical crime drama about a charismatic Japanese soldier trying to find his place in a post-WWII yakuza world.

But as the story trucked along and more characters, alliances, and schemes were introduced, I once again found myself lost. Thats what ultimately sank this one for me. BWHAH does many things wellmemorable images, realistic consequences, and a strong core journey that follows a mans growth from subservience to independencebut keeping track of everything was more work than it was worth. D

Tangy
I wanted to like this one more, but it was admittedly a very tough movie to follow. This film thrives on the politics of the Yakuza, but I absolutely stumbled over the cultural barrier while trying to watch it. That by no means makes it a bad movie, but this list is full of fantastic movies and if I feel like I need a rewatch to understand what happened thats kind of a problem. There are some things I really enjoyed though. The soundtrack was killer and I immediately hear it everytime I think of this movie. By far the best part though was the Yamamoris husband/wife dynamic. It was pretty great seeing her keep a cooler head throughout while having better ideas than her helpless

Mythiot
There are a lot of individual moments I like, particularly in the first half. The "out with the old, in with the new" symbolism of the main character killing the sword-wielding Yakuza with his gun, the blood oath and faked suicide in the prison, the finger-cutting gone wrong, and the overall chaos and haphazardness of the film's style fits the setting of postwar and post-bomb Hiroshima. Overall, I thought it was a bit too messy and the story and characters get lost amid scenes of one side of the gang war killing a member of the other and back and forth. I do have to respect its gritty impactful depiction of the Yakuza.

Poke
A cool entry in the Yakuza side of gang-related films. The jarring chord that plays when anyone is killed will last with me.

Vis
I really couldnt enjoy this film. Ive been willing to give foreign films a shot in the past, and movies like Zucchini, Metropolis, and a large chunk of the Kung Fu list were all enjoyable to me. But with this, I couldnt get into it. The opening sequence is just an assault on my senses, with loud noises and spinning, shaky camera movements, and its during this scene that the movie briefly gives us freeze frames on the various major characters were supposed to care about over the course of the film. I never really GOT that opening scene, so the rest of the film felt like a jumbled mess to me.

Now, obviously, Hirono was meant to be the main character. He gets focused on early, and then hes the one who goes to prison, which is how he ends up buddied with a member of the Doi family and gets an in with the Yakuza life. I get that, and when the film focuses on Hirono, the plot at least makes SENSE. But at a certain point, he gets contracted to kill someone who I THOUGHT was meant to be part of the Kaito family, only for him to be part of the Doi family. And then hes out of the movies for the next, like, thirty minutes. Then all of these political machinations go on, and all the side characters kill each other off in a struggle for power, and I have no idea who most of them are, or why Im supposed to care. The only ones I recognized were Wakasugi from the prison (and hes one of the earliest deaths of the named cast), and Sakai (not because of his personality, but because he always wore sunglasses).

I feel like this movie was told in a very realistic fashion, and it was treated like a true story. In true stories, you dont always have main characters, and the plot sometimes goes in random directions. Sakai getting murdered by random hitmen at the end of the film felt realistic, but unsatisfying from a narrative perspective. And that was the whole movie for mejust a bunch of actions taking place that didnt feel like they were really driving a central plotline, and thus it wasnt enjoyable for me as a MOVIE.

Karo
The story of the postwar japanese underworld, featuring a lot of punching and kicking (and some occasional crying).
The somewhat hard to follow plot navigates the convoluted web of yakuza politics of honor and death (mostly the latter). Every so often someone is unceremoniously shot dead to a repetitive musical fanfare, these may or may not have been important people in the narrative but given how we're supposed to remember the names of the twenty or so people who were all dumped upon us within the first five minutes of the film, the hell if I know.
I was never given any reason to care about or understand any of these characters, to me they are all just sacks of meat who arbitrarily betray and massacre each other and I don't really give a damn.