One-Percent Warrior / 1%er

 This one would have been so easy to screw up.

 Here are the basics: Toshiro (Tak Sakaguchi) is an action movie star who's just too awesome and hardcore for most directors to handle; His last movie was ten years ago, and while critically successful, it was too niche to make any waves.

 The reason is that Toshiro's is totally focused on real action - not just making it good for the cameras, but actually being the best fighter he can possibly be and making his fights as real as possible. This leads him to train in 'assassination jutsu' with actual soldiers, and to develop his own fluid take on a zero-range technique he calls 'the wave'. All this is all presented in a breathless, "just how cool is this guy" style of fluff promotional material that would be grating if it wasn't so spot-on.

 And we soon find out that his quest for perfection, for... let's call it the essence of true badassness, Toshiro's alienated most of the industry and even his apprentices/members of the stunt team (understandable; We see him manhandling and belittling them in that introductory documentary). The guy is driven to the point that he's a complete asshole, but because this is an action movie, we know all that self-aggrandisement comes from a place of honesty. Thankfully Sakaguchi has the screen presence to pull it off, and the script (by director Yûdai Yamaguchi) undercuts some of the grandstanding with a little humour. It's always clear that there's at least a significant element of parody running through the movie.

 Sick of the artificial state of modern Japanese action (complete with a pointed dig at the Rurouni Kenshin movies' more stylised take on martial arts), Toshiro secures a location - an abandoned zinc processing plant in a remote island - and heads there with his only remaining pupil (a very likeable Kohei Fukuyama) to prepare an actual, honest to god action movie - no choreography, just action. Whatever the hell that means, and however he means to achieve it.

 Luckily for him, the universe provides. After running into a hot-shot, effeminate Chinese director who epitomizes everything Toshiro hates (an unsuccessful bit of humour and one of the film's more unfortunate takes), the setup finally starts paying off when a bunch of gunmen enter stage left, shooting indiscriminately and chasing after a teen girl  (Rumika Fukuda wearing a schoolgirl uniform because... of course she is. Japan!).

 The girl is the scion of a huge Yakuza family; Her old man has just died, and dozens upon dozens of thugs led by have descended on the island in search of two freaking tons of cocaine, along with a master assassin (an incredible Togo Ishii), and a psycho teen girl (Kanon Narumi) because, again, Japan.

 Toshiro, of course, starts taking down goons almost immediately, earning the moniker of Jackie Chan among the bemused criminals who find the trail of unconscious thugs he leaves behind. (I'm more of a Bruce Lee, Toshiro observes with his characteristic humility).

 The film shifts gears completely; Its visual style becomes a lot more cohesive, and the rest of the runtime is devoted to a series of brutal, quick fights, often with inventive gimmicks to liven things up. There's some routine, pointless drama threads in between all the combat, and a late, very half-baked existential twist at least adds some sorely needed nuance to all the braggadocio and swagger of the film, ultimately casting it in a very different light. Maybe. I don't think it's entirely successful, but at least it's interesting.

 Aside from that last tonal swerve (which comes in too late to help), the main risk here is that the movie lionizes its star and his worldview a little too much. I don't know that much of Tak Sakaguchi off-screen, but Toshiro does feel like a mythologized version of his on-screen persona, incorporating many elements from past characters. And while the movie's takedown of more wuxia martial arts styles might be funny, it feels a little mean-spirited.

 Luckily the movie has an impish, subtle sense of humour running through it, and Toshiro as a character is not nearly as insufferable as he could be - Sakaguchi's charisma helps a lot.

 (Unfortunately, it's come out since that the actor has admitted to multiple sexual assaults, which does not.)

 The fights are... uneven, and they do drag on a little - The combination between stealth takedowns and more tactical fighting between one overpowered combatant against many low-level mooks in a drab industrial location reminded me a little of a more brawl-focused One Shot, and it's slightly tiresome in a similar vein.

 If I have to be honest, I've never really enjoyed Sakaguchi's fighting scenes as much as, well, the more choreographed style this movie likes to poke fun at, and with a couple of exceptions, it holds true here; He's very quick, but I don't think he sells the powers behind his punches, and that makes some of his moves come a little close to looking like a slap fight. It's telling that my favorite scene of the movie doesn't even feature him, pitting his two former students against Togo Ishii instead.

 The action director is the prolific Kensuke Sonomura, whose work I tend to love, but there are better showcases for his talents... As there are for Sakaguchi's, by the way - like, say, Bad City.

 But I'm being way too harsh - The action is still more than worthwhile, and while the choppy editing sometimes makes it harder than it should be to follow (everything is framed more to make its star look cool than for clarity) there's a lot to like here, including an excellent final fight. Director Yûdai Yamaguchi uses some fun camera moves and is good at keeping things moving, and the soundtrack is surprisingly decent. It's a surprisingly fun film that works both on a surface level and as a meta commentary, even if it's not always clear what it's trying to say.

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 full 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.

Versus

 Versus was pretty well received back when it came out - I remember a lot of acquaintances talking about it, and people kept recommending it to me because I liked 'that Japanese stuff'.

 Unfortunately, Anime doesn't tend to be among the Japanese stuff I like. And man, is this movie ever anime-damaged. A disappointment twenty-odd years in the making.

 You can tell exactly what director Ryûhei Kitamura was into back then by watching this: A lot of Matrix, a lot of Tarantino, a lot of Evil Dead, a little of chanbara (samurai) films. Which, fair enough, that's pretty much what all of us nerds- pardon me, geeks, were into. But Kitamura only lifts the shallowest, most juvenile elements for his pastiche, and besides some fun energy and gore, he doesn't really bring much else.
 How shallow of a pastiche is it? When our hero has to find some clothes, the first thing he comes across is a leather trenchcoat.

There be wankers in them woods.

  There's an opening crawl that's so elaborate and pointless it plays as parody; The plot is some nonsense about an ancient confrontation between an evil Shinto priest (Hideo Sakaki) and a pure hearted samurai (Tak Sakaguchi) - the priest wants to control a portal between life and death, the Samurai wants to protect his lady (Chieko Misaka), whose blood is needed for the priest's evil ritual. Oh, and there's zombies because the portal doesn't let anyone in these woods die properly.

 That's just the prologue. These people, and some other mooks, all reincarnate many centuries later - The Samurai as an escaped convict, almost everyone else as Yakuza, and the girl as... a girl they've kidnapped.

 None of them are aware of what's happening, except the priest, who is a yakuza boss this time around, and is pulling the strings to finally do whatever it is he wants to do.

 But it takes a while for the movie to get to that. First we must endure a long stretch where they posture for ages without doing anything, trying to bring some Tarantino cool to the movie by way of tired old anime tropes. Holy shit is it painful to watch.
 I hate the main character with a passion - he's one of those manga antiheroes that's so cool, so above it all they come across as almost narcoleptic, constantly whining about having to do stuff... an absolute piece of shit character. The girl is a blank, constantly waiting for this shitstain to validate her, and the mooks are a one-dimensional collection of anime stock characters without a single shred of charisma between them. You've got the serious, honorable one, the serious one with glasses and long hair, the psychotic clown who looks like he might pull a face muscle from all his mugging, the incompetent one that's so caught up in his panic attack that he looks almost feral... OK, that last one at least was entertaining to watch. Probably not in the way intended, but as trainwrecks go it's a fun one.

 Then there's another bunch of characters that appear out of the blue. Literally, I have no idea what they're doing in this movie, and they barely interact with the... let's call it story. I'd complain, but they're way more fun and interesting than any of the main characters, with the highlight being a psycho pixie (Hoshimi Asai) who turns up and starts punching people. No posturing, no bullshit, only punching. She gets a really funny death, too.

 It's pretty clear the plot in this doesn't matter in the least - it's just an excuse to string together the scenes Kitamura wanted to do; lots of fights and shootouts, all reasonably fun but without any real choreography. It's all about looking cool, not doing cool stuff, which is a shame because they do put in some effort - there's even some wirework involved.

 For your money you also get Zombie killing, some silly jokes (some of them even work!) and lots of very over-the-top gore. Chintzy, very Matrix-inspired techno music, camera work that's all over the place (including a pretty well done Michael Bay homage, of all things) and all the forest scenery you could possibly want.

 I like the movie's energy, at least when it gets going, and I like some of its goofy humour. I wanted to like its "let's go to the woods and film some cool shit" ethos. Hell, I'd even agree that some of it does manage to be cool, when it's not trying too hard. Shave off an hour, preferably all the early scenes with the Yakuza, and it'd be watchable.