Review of Sonatine (1993) by Kevin W — 15 May 2009

A peculiar, off-beat riff on the gangster film, Takeshi Kitano directs and stars as a yakuza consumed by existential dread, jaded by the life of crime that has robbed him of all emotions. Set up and forced into hiding, he and his colleagues occupy their time the only way they can think of to stave off boredom before extracting his vengeance.

A world away from the crime films of John Woo; the violence is sudden and shocking, not choreographed and stylised. Shot with some nice surreal touches and with a constant atmosphere of inevitability and mortality, Kitano rewrites the rules of the genre, although it's sometimes hard-going and requires patience to navigate the deliberately slow pace.