A brawl in the street in slow motion. Cop and gangster wrestling on the pavement in front of neighbourhood boys frozen as bystanders. Mellow jazz scoring the violent image of a baseball bat striking down upon a cop’s head, resulting in a geyser of blood spatter. A chase results, and continues by foot and by car through the day time city streets, mellow jazz blaring away. The chase goes longer than anticipated, allowing for comic moments and sustained tension, ultimately resolving in further violence. This is one of my favourite sequences from Takeshi Kitano’s debut as a director, Violent Cop (1989).
The film’s opening scenes feature teenagers beating up a homeless man, and later we see children throw cans and bottles from a bridge at a passing barge. Violence is everywhere and the childish nature of it remains persistent as Kitano aka Beat Takeshi walks onto screen as the title character, a violent cop who is barely tolerated by his department, and remains a quiet, churlish presence. Annoying his rookie partner and fellow cops with his gambling habits and constantly borrowing money from them. Intense and implacable from his face, occasionally breaking into a sneer of a smile, Kitano’s character often resembles a schoolyard bully who never shook a sadistic delight in a pratfall.
Kitano’s comedy impulses are very clear as a filmmaker, yet this is a hard-hitting dramatic film that offered a break from what Japanese audiences saw Kitano as at that time, a popular TV comedian and host. Here, the gags are slowly stripped back to concentrate on the antagonism with a sadistic yakuza lieutenant, Kiyohiro (Hakuryû). What would define Kitano’s cinema style (with later masterpieces such as Sonatine and Hana-Bi) is already apparent: stillness punctuated by sharp, repugnant violence. And as it lays out the cop movie Dirty Harry clichés, Violent Cop feels drained of catharsis, and is simply an escalation of brutality with no winners. The lighting in the warehouse climax is quite something, and the conclusion cynical to the separation of cop and crimimal. Recommended.
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