There seem to be three
shades to the prolific, great Japanese film director Kinji Fukusaku. The man took on debatably qualitative English
language work such as Tora! Tora! Tora!,
The Green Slime or Message from Space, cemented his
formidable reputation with the now infamous high-school massacre as modern
social critique Battle Royale or most
notably offered up a wholly original, gritty and violent take on the yakuza
subgenre consisting of stray dogs on the fringes of Japanese society on a drug
induced downward spiral or in the midst of a violent outbreak. Doberman
Cop, the second collaboration the director embarked on with action star
Sonny Chiba within the same year, falls into the latter category.
Like Chiba’s Wolf Guy, the film is based upon a manga
though the aforementioned series proved to be fantastical whereas Doberman Cop is decidedly grounded in
realism. Written by Buronsen of Fist of the North Star fame, the film
adaptation finds Chiba in the titular role of Joji Kano, an Okinawan country
cop who moves to the city life of Tokyo with his pet pig by his side who
quickly mounts his own investigation into a series of serial murders when the
police division fails to bring closure to the crimes. One of director Fukusaku’s least seen
pictures and arguably one of his most underrated, Doberman Cop is a hard boiled cops vs. yakuza tale which proves to
be like If You Were Young: Rage one
of the director’s most lyrical, wild and oddly poignant offerings in his
oeuvre.
While exploiting the cool
swagger of Chiba, Fukusaku’s gritty and often haphazard audiovisual approach of
handheld camerawork and deep telephoto photography compounded with a
melancholic jazz score are what most viewers will remember from Doberman Cop. Though Fukusaku and Chiba indeed make a great
actor-director team, this is mostly Fukusaku’s show through and through with
his usual obsessions concerning self-destructive and neurotic heroin and dope
addicts on the fringes of urban Japan falling in and out of the yakuza way of
life. Chiba’s take on Kano sports
the actor’s usual debonair cool, wild stunts and fighting sequences with the
camera loving every inch of him though Fukusaku gives equal time to the
ensemble cast of characters falling in and out of this often rough around the
edges crime saga. Fukusaku also leaves
ample room for dialogue about the polar opposite balance between the country
and city ways of life with Kano as a kind of Sanjuro Tsubaki wandering through
a modern world locked in mortal combat.
While I’m still going with If You were Young: Rage as my personal
favorite Fukusaku effort, the underseen Doberman
Cop is a wild, rough, tough and even wickedly funny yakuza yarn which
proves once again Fukusaku may well have been the grand master of the yakuza
subgenre. Though many have come and gone
over the years, some by more visually inventive directors than others, Fukusaku’s
down and dirty stylistic approach make his yakuza pictures unmistakably and
only his with many directors merely following in his footsteps if not paying
outright homage (see Takashi Miike’s remake of Graveyard of Honor for example).
Some viewers expecting the operatic ultraviolence of Battle Royale will be disappointed but
longtime Fukusaku followers accustomed to his gritty crime dramas will find
many unexpected pleasures in this otherwise clandestine, somber action
thriller.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki