Bad City

  Kaiko City is... Bad City.
 It's the sort of place where Gojo, a top-level Yakuza (played by Lily Franky) can shrug off a bunch of charges (with the help of the prosecutor!) and then immediately announce a candidacy for mayor. His plan? To use an urban renewal project as cover to build a few casinos. He needs the Korean mafia at his side to do that, so there's a bloody coup brewing as his second in command (Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi) tries to take over with the help of a silent knife-wielding psycho (Tak Sakaguchi, well utilized).

 There's so much corruption no one can do anything against this madman. So one of the few clean prosecution officers in the city goes and does what you do in those situations: put together a crack, off-the-record task force, duh. These policemen and -woman (Hideto Katsuya, Masanori Mimoto and Akane Sakanoue) all come from the serious crimes unit, and their old boss is taken out of jail to lead them (Hitoshi Ozawa).
 The plot is pretty straightforward, but you wouldn't know that from watching the movie for a while; The storytelling is muddled, throwing a lot of names and complications into the mix without a lot of explanation. The film's a throwback to Japanese '80s VoD police thrillers, but since I haven't seen a lot of those what this reminded me most of is the more recent The Roundup films.

The glamour shot.

 Luckily all the crime means that there are a lot of fights as our secret task force tangles with Gojo and his cronies -  and this is where the movie absolutely shines. Early on there's a great fight against a baseball team's worth of Korean mafiosos which Ozawa beats down with a megaphone (the movie isn't devoid of humour, and this fight includes some great prop comedy), and the finale is a rolling brawl where a handful of people face off against a mall's worth of thugs. The action is varied but mostly consists of large punch-ups, sometimes with bats and knives, and while it's mostly realistic (or, to be more precise, 'realistic',) there's some cool silliness like Takaguchi being just too damn awesome to let himself be hit by bullets.
 It's a very low-budget production, but that's not as noticeable as it could be. There's some extremely dodgy-looking digital blood in one of its rare gunfights, but other than that it's pretty smart about not letting its reach exceed its grasp.

 Writer/Director Kensuke Sonomura is only a couple of movies into his directorial career, but he's been an action coordinator and a stuntman for decades. His experience shows: the choreography here is tight and everyone gets a chance to show off some pretty cool moves.
 He does stumble when trying to keep his story threads straight and/or compelling, and when trying to add in some drama (cutting a plucky reporter minor plot would honestly enhance the movie somewhat). Worst of all, at one point you find out one of the good guys had some information right from the beginning that made pretty much the whole plot irrelevant (this is known as The Force Awakens school of scriptwriting). But the characters are likeable, the violence frequent, and Hitoshi Ozawa's gruff charisma help hold things together when people aren't creatively mauling each other on-screen. It's an enjoyable bit of silliness.