There’s a surprising tender heart beating beneath the deliriously violent, blackly funny surface of the exhilarating new film by prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike.
Leo (Masataka Kubota) is a young aspiring boxer who is informed by doctors he has an inoperable brain tumor. One night he rescues a young woman- Monica (Sakurako Konishi) being manhandled by a corrupt cop and they go on the run- pursued by Yakusa, female assassins and a one-armed Chinese gangster with a pump-action shotgun. Poor Monica has been forced into prostitution because of her abusive dad’s debts, addicted to drugs and prone to loony hallucinations.
A young gangster’s clumsy attempt to rob from his own gang is the genesis for all this out-of-control madness, which ends in a bloody showdown in a closed store in the dead of night.
Miike plays much of the violence for dark laughs but the romance between Leo and the hapless girl is achingly poignant.