GONIN 1 Bandai a club owner and well known in Tokyo nightlife, is in big trouble with the Yakuza as he owes a lot of money. Lacking any cash to pay and running out of time he comes up with a plan to rob the Yakuza. He rounds up some people to help him, Ogiwara an unemployed corporate worker, Hizu a former cop who lost his job due to a scandal. Jimmy a wasted addict in love with a Thai prostitute and Mitsuya a con artist who specializes in blackmailing well-placed homosexuals. After going over every detail they attempt to rob the Yakuza. GONIN 2 Masamichi Toyama is a loyal husband with a bad gambling debt. Mobsters out for the money track him down, beating him and raping his wife. Desperate for revenge, he makes himself a sword and sets out to wreak havoc. Unfortunately, when he meets the Gonin, a group of five female thieves, his luck only gets worse.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: squeezed Comment: I like both of these films a lot personally though my honest assessment is that neither is really essential to your film-watching life unless like me, you have a particular taste for japanese crime/violence films. Takashi Ishii is not the greatest director of all time but, coming from his manga background, the visuals are generally always appealing to look at and his personal obsessions and excesses tend to make his narratives more interesting than a lot of the competition (for his other work, see the remarkable but difficult Angel Guts series or his sadomasochistic films Flower and Snake 1/2; he also did the less compelling Black Angel 1/2 and Freeze Me). Gonin is a more successful film than the unrelated sequel (which follows a different set of five women not linked to the five men in the first movie) and it benefits from the quite limited presence of Beat Takeshi lurking around as a heavy.
The disappointing thing here is that both films are on a single disc and Gonin 1 is not anamorphic. This is still an improvement over the virtually unwatchable DVD of questionable origin that was around before, but it seems hard to justify any widescreen releases these days not prepared for 16x9. And Gonin 2, which is anamorphic here, has already had a decent release from media blasters on its own single disc. So why not just release a single anamorphic version of the first film rather than this strange double feature idea? I have not done a comparison between this version of Gonin 2 and the previous release from Media Blasters, but it's certainly not an improved transfer as far as I can see and might even suffer from additional compression. So, I can't really recommend this particular release all that strongly even if you are keen on seeing the films. But, as I said, the other DVD version of Gonin 1 out there is quite badly done, so this is definitely the better of the two releases, just not as good as it could have been.
