Violent Cop Reviews

Back in the 90’s, I was a a huge fan of Takeshi Kitano. At some point, I thought he was so awesome, he might have been even better than Akira Kusosawa. Actually, I wasn’t the only one to think so, indeed, Kitano was definitely one of the major movie directors in the 90’s but it’s such a shame we don’t hear much from him anymore (in fact, the guy has been pretty prolific in the last decade but none of these movies have been really impressive unfortunately). Anyway, I was definitely eager to check his directing debut and it was certainly not disappointing. Indeed, the whole thing is actually the stuff of legend. In fact, someone else was supposed to direct the damned thing but the guy quit when he discovered that Kitano, who was playing the lead character, was only available during some specific time periods (the guy was at the time a massive TV star in Japan and was therefore busy with some television commitments). Kitano joked that he could direct it (having no prior directing experience), took over the director's chair after heavily rewriting the script to remove all traces of comedy. As a result, it is not his best work because he took it over right into the middle of the production but it also had many of his trademarks inherent to his work, like the violence and the poetry for example . To conclude, even though it might not be a masterpiece, I really enjoyed it and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested in Takeshi Kitano’s work.