ThiefHott Too much of everything

Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Twilightfa Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

JLRVancouver Perennial Nikkatsu Studios hard-case Joe Shishido plays 'Togawa', a recently released con who is convinced by a mob boss to plan and execute an armoured car robbery, targeting 120 million yen in race track proceeds. In a typical narrative trajectory for these types of stories, he assembles his team, plans the heist, does the job, deals with the unforeseen complications, and then is double crossed, leading to a third act of reprisal and vengeance. Togawa is an interesting, ambivalent character: he's initially portrayed in a sympathetic light as the orphaned son of parents murdered by the Chinese at the end of WW2 and loving brother of an invalid sister, yet his role in the heist is to ambush and gun down the two escorting police men in cold blood. In keeping with the film's cold, evocative title ("Cruel Gun Story"), the body count is high as 'Togawa' is forced to deal with treachery within his own team, betrayal by the mob boss who hired him, as well as a corrupt ex-lawyer trying to move up in the criminal ranks. The ending is bleak and grim, but satisfying in a noir way. Well worth watching by fans of crime melodramas.

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.

mevmijaumau Takumi Furukawa's movies are really obscure, ranging from noir productions to a 1956 sun tribe film Season of the Sun, one of the prime examples of the genre. In the late '60s, he made two films in Hong Kong under the name Tai Ko Mei. And that's pretty much all the available information on him. Seeing how the director isn't really a known figure, the main reason to watch his film Cruel Gun Story is for the lead actor Joe Shishido - the legendary actor in gangster films who had a cheek implantation surgery to look more suitable to his roles (dafuq was he thinking?). He's the best leading actor in the entire Nikkatsu Noir set, with a cool screen presence. Plotwise, the movie is a racetrack money heist film, so I guess it was inspired by Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Interestingly enough, both films have incredibly generic titles that could fit every crime movie ever made, with Cruel Gun Story being similar to films like Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth or Imai's Cruel Tales of Bushido. The film is very dark and, well, cruel, with ironic twists of fate, double-crossings at every corner, and ending, that, although predictable, still gets its job done. The flow is ruined by the absurdly stupid twist end coming in at the last minute and some issues I have with the heist plan, but maybe the guys are just bad planners. The film's bleakness kinda comes from the social context, with the crooks' criminal choice is due to them being in a socio-economic post-war gutter, and as such, their hideout is a place ruined by U.S. troops. I guess the economic miracle hadn't yet started being felt at the time of the movie's production.The protagonist is somewhat more honorable than his enemies and has a paralyzed sister to take care of, intending to pay her an operation if the scheme goes well. If mishandled, this plot point could easily become a lazy melodramatic device, but the movie handles it very well and Furukawa gives it another dark little twist; in the sense that although the doctors say no operation can fix the sister's legs, Shishido's character still wants it to be true, in the end, making the film's enormous body count revolve around nothing.This movie has some flaws, particularly the absurd final two minutes, but overall it's the most entertaining film from the set so far, has Joe Shishido, a huge body count and cool noir aesthetics. It's a wonderful example of by-the-books studio filmmaking - short runtime, easy plot, a pointless romance sub-plot, and not a single minute wasted. Perfect for quick entertainment. It doesn't hurt that one of the villains resembles Groucho Marx in his autumn years.