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Wonderfully offbeat film!

Best movie of this year hands down!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

'Gonin' contains nothing of interest during the whole movie accept for the ending, which has some style and makes the right choices. All other things in this movie are not good. Some things are not bad either but because the rest is bad we hardly notice those things.The story is the first weak thing. A guy named Bandai (Koichi Sato) owns a disco. Things are not going very well and he accepts money from the Yakuza-gang but can't pay it back. Therefor he decides to steal money from that gang with the help of four friends. When the gang has found out who stole their money they hire two hit men to kill Bandai and his helpers. One of the hit man is played by Beat Takeshi, and he probably is the only one who creates a real character. After this simple set-up the only good thing we see is, like I said, the ending.Another bad thing is the violence and the way it is presented. Some say this movie is very violent and in a way it is true. But I think you should not take the violence too seriously. Early in the movie a guy is hit by a baseball bat, many times and with some power, and he is still perfectly standing on his feet, ready for a counter attack. Yes, there is violence, but compared to a lot of other movies ('True Romance' comes to mind) 'Gonin' is not that violent.In the end you are left with a movie that is not interesting at all. It uses slow motion in a strange way, the cinematography is not that special and that combined with a weak story and everything but perfect acting you have a bad movie. Fortunately there is the ending. First of all it saves some of the wasted minutes and second of all we are finally done.

An incoherent mess of violent visions, not helped by the execrable quality of the "Ocean Shores" DVD and its dubious subtitles. The popularity of Beat Takeshi must derive from something other than this film, in which he wears an expressionless face and shoots people. If you want to have a better opinion of director Takashi Ishii, watch the far superior girls-with-guns flick Black Angel.

An extremely fast paced gangster film with a couple of great elements that rescue it from being ordinary. Takashi Ishii's wonderful neon/fluorescent aesthetic runs throughout the film. Everything is either some kind of oddly-colored light source, an actor, or pitch black. The music is moody and the violence is just erratic and savage enough to be fairly unpredictable. Of course, nobody conveys violence quite like Takeshi Kitano who shows up for the last half of the movie as a hitman creepy enough make Christopher Walken uneasy. The homoerotic tension between the heroes is surprisingly touching by the end and there is one psychotic salaryman that makes an awfully big impression, which I won't risk giving away.

This movie is great. I've seen it many times and my enthusiam still increase at each time. The complex storytelling mix with extreme stylized direction by Takashi Ishii make this an unforgettable experience. The violence is intense and at some point graphic but never gratuitous. The director pushes the boundaries of "homoeroticism" action film and all the technical aspects of the film are inventive and flawless. A must-see and one of the best action films ever!