Tokyo Mafia: Battle for Shinjuku

This appears to have been intended as a pre-quel to the original Tokyo Mafia series; but it has its own axes to grind, and can be (and perhaps ought to be) viewed separately. The first two films (which present two halves of the same story) are presented in a breathless B-movie style intended to push the envelop on some values of the well-established Yakusa genre just for to be hip and shocking at the same time.

The present film is after something totally different. There are plenty of shock-value bits thrown in, but with a sense of banality in their execution, rather like one finds in the films of Beat Takeshi or Takeshi Miiki - it is not simply that the people are doing very bad things, but there isn't any good for them to do, the world has grown old and corrupt. Thus the final sequence raises the whole question of whether there is any "way of the yakuza" at all, a kind of question that can't be raised in a typical genre B-movie.

Although the dialog is crisp and to the point (the original series was a bit talky), and the actors are all very good for their roles, raising the thematic question is achieved primarily through direction, camera-work, editing. For me, that makes this a superior film - a good story can't make a good film unless there is good film-making to define it; and good film-making can sometimes salvage a bad story, but bad film-making can utterly ruin a good story.

for instance, one thematic element here has to do with the electric-powered wheel-chair an aging gang-boss uses; its presentation in the film underscores the lowered expectations of the boss himself, and the fact that his gang has somehow stagnated in a world still moving on.

There's a good story here, but is it strong enough to bear the weight of such themes and their cinematic presentation? I'm not yet sure; but I'm giving the film a nine, because it's certainly worth viewing again to try to find that out.

This film essentially begins with a man by the name of "Gingya Yabuki" (Riki Takeuchi) being double-crossed by his friend "Sho Saimon" (Masayuki Imai) during a gunfight and having to escape to Taiwan to recover from his wounds. Being a former member of the Yakuza, Gingya understands that it wasn't personal on Saimon's part, but even so, it's not something that he can just forget about. That being said, upon recovering, he has a plan in mind which will seriously impact the financial resources of the Yakuza organization which Saimon is affiliated with. The only problem, however, is that he first has to assemble a team to help him out and, because he has no money, this may not be so easy. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this particular movie seemed to be more of a prequel to the first movie than an actual sequel in this series. As such, some of the predominant characters were quite different. Additionally, it didn't seem like very much time was time was spent on the production of this film because the plot wasn't nearly as in-depth as the previous two films. Lots of action, but no real depth. In any case, although I certainly don't consider this to be a bad film necessarily, I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed with it, it and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly below average.