Nobody

Paranoid, street crime freakout indeed!
UPDATE ADDED DEC. 7 2012: It's been brought to my attention that this review, and several others for this excellent Japanese thriller have been ported over to the product listing for an import DVD of a "postmodern ballet" (see comment attached here) called Nobody, which very much is NOT a Japanese thriller. For those coming to this review via Amazon's bad habit of posting reviews across multiple products that simply happen to share the same name, THIS is the product I'm referring to: Nobody

NOBODY is a fantastic piece of Japanese noir. It's about three salarymen who get in way over their heads when their innocent, drunken cheapshots p*** off three OTHER guys one night in a bar. When these three mysterious strangers, who are up to much more deviant no-goodness than even the film allows us to know, beat the living daylights out of one of our "heroes", the trio decides to return the favour in kind - only...

The Avengers visit Tokyo
Four stars for movie concept, two for DVD presentation. An excellent plot summary is given in the other reviews and I'll weave my comments around their remarks.

If you accept the premise that a barroom tiff over a Rolex and a Zippo can result in an extended hunt-and-be-hunted romp through the land of the rising sun, then you can probably get a kick (no pun intended) out of Shundo Ohkawa's thriller. I must confess that this premise kept me out of this movie's groove for the first half hour, but I settled into things once these western eyes of mine realized that I'm basically watching an Averngers-like plotline, complete with mysterious motives, hunt-and-kill creatively done, and a wink at the audience at the end. I'm not sure of director Shundo Ohkawa's direct influences, but the film is analogous to the Avengers' "Superlative Seven" episode, or the old film classic "The Most Dangerous Game", this time in an urban jungle.

Certain things are missing, mostly in the character...

Fine idea, muddled by a lousy script and bad direction.
In this modern Japanese, urban thriller, a minor set of words between two groups of business men leads to one of them getting beat up. They try find the other group to get revenge, but come up empty handed until late one night when they come across one of the rival men in a subway. The three friends beat him severely, so much that they run away, and begin checking the papers to see if they killed him. Soon they begin to get phone calls from the men saying that they have killed the man (though there is no evidence), panic sets in, and slowly they begin to get picked off.

Were these men just crazy business men? Bloodthirsty Yakuza? Crooked Cops? Unfortunately these questions and the I Know What You Did Last Summer-like plotline, dont hold up very well, and are executed in clumsy fashion. The deaths, the suspicion, and the finale, fall too far into b-movie territory. The script, direction, and cinematography, likewise, are poor. Its the kind of movie you watch and end up being...

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