Good start, but then it gets ruined

A Brilliant Conflict

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I was totally stunned with this one. As Kitano is my favorite actor from the Japanese cinema, I found this movie depressing, disgusting, sad, desperate - as it should be. A great movie. Beat Takeshi did great job with this one. My primary feelings was: Im glad,I don't have a living like these people do. Im glad that Kitano show me another aspect of real life somewhere from the bottom. The movie is not rushing anywhere - the scenes talks themselves. Sex, violence, silent relations. He showed us a man that exist, a man that we all fear. A man who has a life anyways. I agree with edison-chang who said it is a Great Piece of depressing Junk - yes, it is. But someone said: In the eye of the beast - a tear. May be there was a small grain of humanity left in the hero of Kitano. May be ?!?I've read some of the comments below. And I see people disappointed. Some of you does not find any sense in motion picture of Kitano. Some of you found it a clueless junk. I find it brilliant - and we are all right. The true is that Kitano always plays gangsters in his movies. Mostly gangsters. Why is he so violent?! Because it need to be - the gangsters found their way in the society by being violent. In this movie he is gangster too. He takes what he wants and being passive is the only opportunity for people around him - thats the misery. Such places exist - such persons do exist - everything seems to be real and I find it real. Being violent gives you some preferences - you get the money, the business of other people, you get the women you want and you can do whatever you want without being punished... that the movies shows and we all know that that kind of people always get away from the justice. Sad. Real. Hatred. Force. Violence. Fear. Thats the life on the bottom. And no one could help you - it is not good being a victim.

This movie wasn't exactly my first choice of a show to watch on a Sunday afternoon, but it was what my husband was very keen to catch, so we saw it. Barely a few minutes into the movie, i had to watch a violent marital rape scene, and i thought "oh oh..i don't think i'm going to like this movie at all." However, as we left the cinema as the credits rolled, i told my husband that as hard as it was to watch this movie, i still found it compelling and in a strange, sad sort of way, i enjoyed it. i think if i summarized, it was the story of the life of a violent man who did what he wanted, when he wanted, with whom he wanted with nary an iota of regard for another human being. It was the story of how he lived and how he died, as seen thru the eyes of his son.

This movie has the most powerful and devilish but the weakest hero in the whole movie history. You must see this movie and you will love it. This movie has the big aura that doesn't matter for any century or place.If you didn't see any Asian or Japanese movie, and if you are true hard-boiled fan, this is must try.Takeshi Kitano played his best acting in this movie. He played one man's 30's to death.Yoichi Sai, the director of this movie, shows the power of one man who are faced the war and the pain who had to deal with it. But it's not sympathy movie.One more, this is not action movie, it shows one man's life, but this is more spectacle than any other action movie.

This movie represents the first leading role Beat Takeshi has taken in more than a decade in a movie he didn't direct. The advance reviews of his performance were enthusiastic, and his powerful depiction of the violent and controlling Kim Shunpei more than lives up to the notices. Still, the film itself is a flawed creation; unable to pack all of the critical backstory of the original best-selling book even into a 140-minute film, the director settles for presenting a series of scenes that cycle repeatedly between set-up, violent outburst, and aftermath , with little connecting tissue and almost no effort to explain how or why the main character became the dangerous 'monster' he is. With leaps of years and even decades between scenes, it's clear that many of the book's defining incidents failed to make the screenplay, and while the lead and supporting performances are almost uniformly fine, I left the theater exhausted from the violence but feeling nothing for the victims--Kim's family, neighbors and employees--of it. (It is also probable that foreign audiences, not familiar with the cultural, political, and social issues surrounding the ethnic Korean community in Japan, will have trouble appreciating the crucial nuances of language and expression, most of which are unlikely to survive the subtitling process).