Review #916 - Violent Cop (1989)
THE SCOOP
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Maiko Kawakami, Makoto Ashikawa
Plot: A violence prone police officer discovers that his colleague is trafficking drugs.
Genre: Action / Crime / Drama
Awards: -
Runtime: 103min
Rating: M18 for violence.
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
“Well,
you've got good taste.”
There's a short
scene in Violent Cop that sees
Takeshi Kitano's character hitting baseballs with a bat. Fast forward to his latest flick, the Yakuza
sequel Outrage Beyond (2012) and
there is an eerily similar scene, only that the baseballs that shoot out of the
automated machine don't meet a wooden stick, but an immobile and semi-conscious
person's face that gets increasingly bloody with each hit.
That has been
the essence of Kitano's work over two decades; his films are imbued with a
sense of what I call “recycled originality”, which gives them an unmistakably
Kitano-esque quality. Kitano who often
stars in his own directed films essentially plays the same few characters on
opposite sides of the law.
Here, he is the
violent cop. He doesn't follow the book,
breaks the law, and kicks and slaps his adversaries involuntarily. He is like the Asian “Dirty Harry”. In Violent
Cop, he has to wage war on corrupted police officials and lowly gangsters
dealing with drugs. He doesn't care much
about anything, even himself, and is just plain snotty. Kitano has a screen presence that screams “don't
f--- with me” and his performance is a delight to watch.
Violence is a
staple of Kitano's works and it calls attention to itself. The shootouts are well-executed with a right
balance of suspense and blood, proving that Kitano is a skilled entertainer
with a flair for raw and gritty aesthetics.
His later crime films would become more polished, but never becoming
more mellow.
Violent
Cop
is one of the more memorable first films by a new Asian filmmaker in the late
1980s. Its uncompromising take on the
cops-and-criminals thriller, so popularized by the Hong Kong crime cinema of
John Woo, Johnnie To and many more, was a breath of fresh air for a country
that had long been synonymous with samurai flicks, bleak parables on society
and tradition, and anime - such are the films of Kurosawa, Ichikawa, Ozu,
Mizoguchi, Oshima, Miyazaki, and numerous other Japanese masters.
Kitano's Violent Cop is an important jolt for
Japanese cinema, an example of an audacious filmmaker vying to be recognized by
an international audience with his unique brand of hard-hitting, nihilistic and
strangely affecting cinema.
GRADE: B+
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