Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

FrogGlace In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

JLRVancouver Perennial Nikkatsu Studios hard-case Joe Shishido plays 'Togawa', a recently released con who is convinced by a mob boss to plan and execute an armoured car robbery, targeting 120 million yen in race track proceeds. In a typical narrative trajectory for these types of stories, he assembles his team, plans the heist, does the job, deals with the unforeseen complications, and then is double crossed, leading to a third act of reprisal and vengeance. Togawa is an interesting, ambivalent character: he's initially portrayed in a sympathetic light as the orphaned son of parents murdered by the Chinese at the end of WW2 and loving brother of an invalid sister, yet his role in the heist is to ambush and gun down the two escorting police men in cold blood. In keeping with the film's cold, evocative title ("Cruel Gun Story"), the body count is high as 'Togawa' is forced to deal with treachery within his own team, betrayal by the mob boss who hired him, as well as a corrupt ex-lawyer trying to move up in the criminal ranks. The ending is bleak and grim, but satisfying in a noir way. Well worth watching by fans of crime melodramas.

boblipton Jô Shishido is fresh out of prison and is picked to lead a crew in an armored car robbery. He needs the money for an operation for his sister, so he agrees to take on a tough crew. However, things don't go right, and there is betrayal and a chance for vengeance awaiting him.Although the heist is well performed, I found the sheer violence, from beginning to end to be almost a parody of the form. Shishido starts by beating up his potential crewmates in order to establish... that this is one of the Nikkatsu crime thrillers, I suppose, and those are about tough guys committing crimes with plenty of bloodshed. That it does, but it offers little to the genre but Shishido in his typecast screen role, doing more of the same.... an excess rather than an advance and foreshadowing the logical end point of the dramatic form.

MartinHafer "Cruel Gun Story" stars one of the weirder actors of his era, Jô Shishido. I say weird because Shishido actually paid to have surgery to give him bizarre cheeks--making him appear, somewhat, like a human chipmunk! This apparently made him quite popular in Japanese crime films (I didn't realize that Japanese criminals were cursed with this odd facial characteristic!). I've seen him in quite a few films including: "Branded to Kill", "Youth of the Beast", "Detective bureau 2-3" and "Gate of Flesh" and he is the epitome of Japanese cool.When the story begins, you learn that Shishido's been in prison for killing a man who ran over Sashido's sister. As a result, the sister is wheelchair-bound, so Shishido felt compelled to kill the guy. Now, he's been sprung from prison early--apparently some mob boss wants him lead a team in an armored car robbery. Shishido agrees--as he hopes that the money can pay for some miracle surgery to heal her. Unfortunately, there's more to the plan than Shishido is aware of and perhaps this is NOT a good way to make a fast buck. Can our anti-hero somehow survive this bold caper? I could say more, but it would spoil the film.This is a very taut and exciting crime film thanks to a great plot, good acting and Shishido's character--a nice mixture of coolness, machismo and, in an odd way, honor. Plus, I sure liked the very dark ending--what a finale. Overall, I'd say this is one of the best examples of Japanese noir I have seen and it's well worth seeing--whether or not you are a fan of the genre.

chaos-rampant If you came to the movies in the Eclipse Nikkatsu Noir boxset expecting something like Seijun Suzuki, you will be disappointed. There's a reason Seijun Suzuki has a reputation like he has and there's a reason Nikkatsu fretted with every movie he made and eventually fired him. Suzuki saw Nikkatsu's formula for crime potboilers for what it was and reduced it to the casual. He attacked it. He was the bright exception, and a film like Cruel Gun Story is the formula, the beaten path, and now that the Eclipse box set allows us immediate context, Suzuki seems that much more daring. He was eventually blacklisted for his transgressions for a decade and Nikkatsu staved off bankruptcy until the early 70's, so that's how that cruel story goes.This is the heist film where a crew of low-entry criminals get together for a big job, in this case to rob an armoured car carrying racetrack money. If nothing else, at least the plans in these films are usually elaborate enough to be fun to watch them being hatched, carried out in anxiety, and fail with disastrous consequences. Not so in this case. If a non-writer was given 10 minutes and a napkin to write it down, he could have probably come up with something more plausible/intriguing than this: force armoured car with bulletproof windows to detour into dirt road, ambush, fire at the escorting police motorcycles, then hope the driver and escort inside the car will be stupid enough to run out of the safety of their bulletproof vehicle into the open to be killed and conveniently provide the safe key to the robbers. Mercifully it doesn't work that way; yet to have us a believe the robbers would stage a heist and base it on that improbable chance firmly places Cruel Gun Story in Tintin territory.The only interesting aspect of this is that the robbers are forced to take the van to their hideout with the driver and police escort still inside. A gunfight takes place there, there's a lot of gunsmoke and sparks fly, but that semi-interesting set piece is brought to a screeching halt when someone lights dynamite and throws it inside the warehouse. Of course someone picks it up and throws it back out. It's a like a gagman from the 1920's dropped by the studio the day of shooting the scene and improvised something on the spot.Despite what it says on the tin, these are not noir films. The Japanese did a lot of great things in their postwar cinema, but they didn't understand noir. We get a 'crime doesn't pay' finale to be sure, and if you thought Casablanca was too literal in saying the same thing in its own finale, you have to see the protagonist lying dead on a pile of money catching on fire to realize Michael Curtiz was only too subtle by comparison, but that's not what noir is about. Cruel Gun Story is basically a b/w crime flick where Jo Shishido yells and punches people randomly, someone is betrayed and comes back for revenge, yet there's no fatalism and the noir God who indifferently pulls the strings in a cold yawning universe is conspicuously absent.