Boiling Point (1990)

Really Surprised!

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This movie started out pretty slow pacing and kind of boring. I gotta say i was confused the first 40 minutes. But then Takeshi Kitano showed up and then all the fun started. He acts perfect in this movie. You gotta love him in this role. I laughed my pants of. Its good to see some funny violence. One thing i liked about the violence is that there were no exaggerated sounds when hitting. There is just one thing and that is the ending. I have no idea on what happened and i have seen many discussing this topic. I gotta say i have no clue. I think everyone who likes the Tarantino violence should see this movie. Go and find it and buy it. You won't be disappointed.

This precursor to Sonatine and Hana-bi (as well as Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown) has all the elements that become Kitano trademarks - the skewered dark humour, deadpan expressions, misogyny, long periods of everyday life suddenly punctured by explosions of brutality. The humour works best - the beer bottle over the head gag and the confusion with the gun outside the gangsters' office being particularly memorable. The dialogue is spartan, which works most of the time, but is plodding when it doesn't, as in the reconciliation scene that ends with shared ice-lollies. The biggest sticking point is the character of Iguchi. He dominates the first half- hour, and his failure to reappear after the Okinawa sequence is unsatisfying. In fact, it spoils the whole third act. This is a bleak vision of modern Japan, strangely de-populated and amoral. It is Kitano's Japan, and if you have had some of that before, you'll lap this up. Certainly not his best, better than Sonatine but not as good as Hana-bi. But good nonetheless.

Strange—an elegant thug picks on a small, shy, hapless baseball player-gas station attendant, who hits him back. The yakuzas take the affront seriously, and there's a complicated multiple-layer plot, involving the main character's sudden improvement as a baseball-player—he hits a home-run but overruns the slow runner ahead of him—and somehow involving a friend and former gangster, Iguchi, who demands respect, and sends the guy to Okinawa to buy a gun. In Okinawa with the slow runner he falls in with a pair of gangsters who party all night and get guns the next day; the main gangster, played by the director "Beat" Takeshi, is casually mean to his girlfriend, and he kills the gun merchant and the very formal yakuzas who are demanding money from him. As the gas station attendant and the slow runner leave he's killed in the parking lot of the Okinawa airport. The gsa and the sr go to the yakuza headquarters with the gun, but they don't know how to take the safety off and get beaten up. The gsa takes a fuel truck and with his pretty young girlfriend crashes into the y hq in an enormous ball of flame. The movie ends as it began, in the darkness of the portable john, and then as the credits roll the gsa trots across the park to the ballfield. I don't know—it's sort of disaffected or something, the main character hardly reacting to the world, expressionless mostly. Some funny scenes, and a lot of tough talk and punching and pointless mess.

*3-4x jugatsu* is a cocktail of drama,crime and absurd situations that never convince.The plot isn't interesting at all and its boring after 30 minutes. Sometimes very bloody,sometimes very hilarious but the humor comes on the wrong moments. The cast does a good job and that's the only positive element of this movie. 4.5/10