I noticed that all the reviewers liked this movie--and some absolutely adored it. I guess I'll be the dissenting voice, as I thought that a movie that tries so hard to be weird and incomprehensible is not worth my trouble. After all, several admitted that the narrative made little sense and the movie needed to be seen repeatedly in order to fully understand it. I say "why bother". If I cannot understand a movie and am confused by it, my first instinct is NOT to see it again! In many ways, this film looks almost as if Jean-Luc Godard took drugs, went to Japan and made a film. And if you like this sort of bizarre fare, then by all means watch it. I just want a film that makes some sense!

The film is about an assassin who looks like a giant hamster because of his freakish looking cheeks (Jô Shishido--who actually paid to have plastic surgery to give his this look). He is somehow considered the #3 assassin in Japan, though I didn't realize that there was any sort of a ranking organization (maybe this is like the BCI and American college football). He wants to be #1 and much of the film shows him on various assignments killing people. Some of this is pretty neat and stylish, some of this is just strange. When he's not out killing people to improve his standings, he's at home have very, very intense and super-athletic sex with his wife.

A pretty young Japanese lady with a big nose hires Mr. #3 to do an almost impossible assassination. When it fails, the film gets really goofy, as first his wife tries to kill him, then the big-nosed lady does. None of this has any sort of a linear or comprehensible narrative and you wonder if the film makers were on crack or schizophrenic.

Throughout the film there are lots of bizarre fetish-like flourishes. There are lots of small dead birds--and they keep appearing throughout the film. One even has a needle through its neck. I sure felt sorry for the creatures--why killing them was necessary, I don't know. Also, Mr. #3 also had a weird fetish for the smell of boiling rice.

Later, the wife returns and wonders why Mr. #3 is upset that she tried to kill her. All is apparently forgiven--that is until he knocks her down and urinates on her (at least that APPEARS to be what he's doing). She then spills the beans about some dumb plot and begins to cry in a very annoying fashion (I wanted to kill her at this point). Moments later, her clothes are off and she's begging him to do her--at which point he blows her away (I mean he kills her) and you see her head in the toilet. Nothing like a good romance, huh?! Even later, Mr. #3 finds the big-nosed lady dead along with film showing how she died. I think it's supposed to be touching and Mr. #3 cried a lot--though I had absolutely no idea why. Didn't she try to kill him ten minutes earlier?! At this point, Mr. #3 gets a call from what might be Mr. #1. He issues him a challenge and somehow Mr. #3 manages to kill everyone waiting for him at some place near the harbor. But, Mr. #1 is not there! Mr. #1 then phones to say he IS Mr. #1 and will one day kill him.

The rest of the film consists of the two men trying to kill each other--as Mr. #1 calls to taunt Mr. #3 periodically. This test of wills seems to go on for days--during which 3 does a lot of mindless things that I won't even bother to describe. Eventually, Mr. #1 comes for a social call and the two of them sleep together (no sex, mind you). In the next scene, Mr. #3 is so worried about letting down his guard that he pees himself rather than take a bathroom break. No THAT'S dedication. During this long absurdist sleepover that never seems to end, the viewer is left wondering what the crap is happening. All you know is #1 and 3 could kill each other but mostly just sit around staring in space. In fact, the entire last third of the movie is just this nonsense.

Eventually, Mr. #1 and #3 get around to FINALLY trying to actually kill each other--during which time Mr. #3 sweats like a hog. Thankfully, once the deed is done, the movie mercifully ends. And I have seldom been this happy to see a movie end!!!

Overall, this is the lamest excuse for entertainment. The film is incomprehensible, has ridiculous characters and leads me to wonder why they made such a film? After all, 'normals' certainly won't enjoy it and it seems like it was only made for the select elite--those who "get it". Heck, haven't any of you heard the story about the Emperor's new clothes?! The only reason I give this a 2 and not a 1 is because a few of the killings were kind of cool AND it had a happy ending (because it finally ended).

By the way, this film has lots and lots of nudity. However, the Japanese convention was not to show pubic hair, so all full frontal shots have the naughty regions mysteriously covered. Regardless, it's not a film you want to show to your mother!

A hit-man, with a fetish for sniffing boiling rice, fumbles his latest job, putting him into conflict with his treacherous wife, with a mysterious woman eager for death and with the phantom-like hit-man known only as Number One.

The film grew a strong following, which expanded overseas in the 1980s, and has established itself as a cult classic. Film critics and enthusiasts now regard it as an absurdist masterpiece. It has been cited as an influence by filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, John Woo, Chan-wook Park and Quentin Tarantino, and composer John Zorn.

Indeed, while watching this, my thought was that this kind of action and score would be right up Tarantino's alley. While the film as a whole is very good, the crowning moment is when the man runs out of the house on fire, making little effort to douse the blaze. Brilliant!

Seijun Suzuki has a lot of nerve as a director, and I mean that as complimentary as it can sound. He pushes buttons without being too exploitive- he knows the genre by the back of his hand, has likely seen his share of 40s film noir and gangster pictures, and knows at least a little of the French new-wave (or rather seems to carry over a similar spirit). So he knows also, even more crucially, how to turn the genre on its head while keeping a sense of poetry to the proceedings. It's hard to pull off a sense of the poetic in a crime film, but Suzuki's camera techniques are to the quality that he can get his actors at the same level of a challenge of sorts. Branded to Kill is about deconstructing the myths of the hit-man, the qualities of emotion and subservience, of duty and sacrifice, the coldness, and the suppressed longing for death that is encompassing. And damn if it isn't a helluva lot of fun as pulp entertainment, a tale told with some strange characters and even stranger twists of fate, and loaded to the gills with sex and violence.

That last part, I might add, is important in seeing Branded to Kill in context forty years ago. Who else but Suzuki, and maybe Arthur Penn, would go for this level of bizarre violence and uncompromising sex at the time, and at the same time not turn it into some kind of B-movie spectacle? Come to think of it, the premise and essential plot is pure B-movie: a hired killer, Hanada, aka #3 (Jo Shishido, very bad-ass even as he goes crazy),is very good at his job, so good that he's able to kill #2 in a big shoot-out scene in the first twenty minutes of the film, as he escorts another gangster around. Coming back from that mission, he gets a ride from mysterious Misako (Anne Mari),who gives him a mission to kill someone for her. But it goes bad, he's kicked out of the syndicate, and now will be killed by his old bosses. This problem is broken up by two things: 1, #3 is so good, even under total stress from his girlfriend Mami trying to kill him ("We're beasts", she says to him crying her eyes out in supposed guilt),he kills all of those who are supposed to kill him; and 2, he meets killer #1- the "Phantom" killer, who will soon kill him...'soon' being the dreaded word.

Well, as 'pure' as it can be under the circumstances anyway. It's essentially the story of an assassin who has the tables turned on him, and has to step up to the challenge- will he be #1? Can there ever be any kind of #1 in the world of hired killers? The last half hour is mostly only #3 and #1 in the apartment, as they both reach for their guns at the same time and neither uses them. It becomes a game of psychological torture (not to mention nerves),which reaches a fever pitch by the time the climax at the gymnasium comes around. But around this genre story we get Suzuki's style as a director, which is startling, provocative, tawdry, and surreal, whatever one could think to call it. Over the opening credits we see a tiny light go over the names, and the first shot is a random airplane image. There's plenty of indelible images from the film- killer #2 running out of the building on fire; the uproarious, delirious moths and lines and other figures that #3 sees around him at one point; the simple sight of our hero smelling his beloved rice, his first love; Misako in close-up staring at the killer in the rain- chillingly performed by Anne Mari like she's just got out of electro-shock- telling him her hatred of men and her lack of fear for death.

But around these images Suzuki is confident at casting his torn and frayed #3 killer (Jo Shishido gives the performance of a career, with him getting better as the film goes on and he's put in more surreal circumstances),and at being a master of compositions. He and DP Kazue Nagatsuka put just the right lift of suspense and danger to scenes, like the drunken gangster taunting to be shot in the tunnel, or #3 being told he'll be killed the first time and laughing it off, or even the near sci-fi-style of shooting the sides of the buildings. There's maybe a reason, aside from the perverse attention to dark comedy and weird drama in the proceedings, that the producers decided to fire the director after seeing his finished cut: he doesn't follow the rules, or whatever the rules might be in so much practice going into the norm, for shooting a traditional gangster film. Why not just keep the camera still on the whole building as a man falls to his death from the top? Or how about as our hero is on the phone we're seeing most of what's above his head in the apartment, then shifting below? It's a risk that Suzuki takes, to make the style reflect atmosphere of the urban landscapes, on top of that of the terrors facing #3, and only once or twice looking too self-conscious. In a word, it's hip.

It's probably not surprising then that the speed and energy and form of the style feels influential to so many who skate that line between mainstream and art-house, while at the same time doesn't feel aged at all. If anything, the sex is still hot, the sudden violence still shocking (and shockingly funny),and the ending as perfect a sum-up of the devastation of the ego of violence and death, the monstrosity of it, as could be imagined. I love it, in all its subtle, crazy independent wide-screen glory, and it serves as a great introduction to Suzuki's oeuvre.