Gonin Review
An unflinching gaze into the abyss, Gonin is a savage, stylish, and thoroughly absorbing work that starts as a crime thriller but morphs into a jet black exploration of death, loss, and meaning. The film's gangster flick set up -- a quintet of disenfranchised losers take out a yakuza office-- dispenses with genre formula by the second act: there are no explosions, no likeable characters, and no cathartic confrontations. Instead, there is impending, inescapable doom. As the mob's hitman bears down on the five like a wrathful god, their attempts to shelter their loved ones from their misdeeds inevitably leads to their demise. Their plight is reduced to a horrible clarity: either die with guns ablazing or die with a bullet in the back. Like the more famous works of Quentin_Tarantino -- Pulp_Fiction and Reservoir_Dogs -- this film features violence designed to jar the most jaded of audiences. Yet while the center of Tarantino's films lies in an ironic wink and nod, the center of Takashi_Ishii's opus can be found in a heartfelt lust for death pushed to an extreme. Like by-standers watching a car wreck, the audience comes to share the director's dark bloodlust: the question is not will the characters die, but how. Gonin thrills and unnerves while standing as an exuberant celebration of the death impulse. Jonathan Crow, Rovi
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