Reviews

The film is the Japanese answer to American mafia movies.

The director Kinji Fukasaku also knowed for his recent successfull movie "Battle Royale", began his carrer with Yakuza's movies being the most representative director of the genre and considered like the master of this kind of films, inspiring well-known authors like Kitano and Miike. In "cops vs thugs" he breaks the thin border between cop and thugs and mix them in a violent and corrupted world, being difficult to know who is the good or bad guy. Perhaps because everyone have two faces.

The actors play a good performance and the main character plays a superb role struggling between the law and common sense, he alone against the world like inspector Harry Callahan, but the humanity of the character consist in his doubts.

The plot of the movie isn't very original, landscape speculation, but for the movie don't have any importance. Also the music inspired in American movies of seventies give more dinamism to action scenes.

In conclusion a good movie highly recommended to genre fans, where no one is free of guilty, that can be summarize with a line from the script: "Gangsters and cops are the same. They both respect codes and laws."

8/10

Perhaps Asian movies there are considered slow. But inside this slow-motion film you can feel the intensity of the human emotions in every look.

The intensity of every shoot makes this movie an extraordinary experience for everybody.

The plot of the film is something more than a tribute of a losing tradition, the puppets art, is about the relationships between an old man an his adopted niece. How the affection between they could break absurd but ingrain traditions from hundreds of years ago.

The incredible sequences of puppets are only an addition in the incredible beauty of the Taiwanese landscape.The entire movie in general has a flavour that makes it tasty from start to finish.