Beat Takeshi, a TV comic made over into a movie tough guy, is the star. Takeshi Kitano is the director. They are one and the same man. He makes an interesting object on screen: his damaged face (product of a motor-scooter accident), his glassy eye, his tiny twitch, his frozen expression, the general aura of an unrested zombie. And the role of the melancholy policeman with a dead daughter, a dying wife, a heavy debt to the mob, and a burden of guilt over a trio of murdered and maimed colleagues, is custom-fitted. His behind-the-camera personality is, if anything, even more tortured. The scrambled time sequence turns a conventional policier into an art-house puzzle picture, so that the viewer is always the last to know, and by a long gap, what's going on. And the cool, aloof, abrupt presentation seems loath to acknowledge the extreme violence and no less extreme sentimentality. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.