In debt to the Ogoshi mob, ex-celebrity and club owner Bandai robs the gansters' safe and plans to start a new life with his former wife. He succeeds with the help of a local thug, a gay hustler, a recently fired salaryman and an ex-cop-turned-bouncer, but the mob retaliates.
Do writer/director Takashi Ishii hate girls? While I don't really think he does, and while it might all be a big coincidence, the fact is that every girl that shows up in Gonin meets a gruesome fate. One is raped to death, someone else gets a baseball bat in the head, another one gets shot and even two little girls are murdered in the film, and so on and so forth. I'm sure there nothing to it, but it just felt strange that first off, there are not many females present in the film to begin with, and those unlucky enough to show up on screen gets whacked, one way or another. But a lot of men gets whacked too, and the film is just as violent as it is weird. And it's plenty weird all right, in fact, it's even a bit gay. If you wanna analyze things deeper, maybe that's why the females gets whacked "to make room" for the more gay-ish approach...well, beats me.
Anyway, we get to follow this ex-celebrity Bandai who's in debt to the local Yakuza. The guy runs a nightclub but needs money asap, so being as desperate as he is, he figures that he should rob the Yakuza he's in debt to. So the ex-celebrity starts recruiting people and it's not the most normal guys on the face of the planet that he "hires". One's an ex-cop name Hizu, one is a recently fired salaryman who is one strange/deranged fellow indeed, and except for those two, Bandai recruits a thug named Jimmy who seems to be a bit retarded, along with a gay hustler named Mitsuya. I know it might sound funny, but on film it is not, it's just wierd and utterly violent, pretty much at all times.
 
Well, the group of five may not make the most professional team ever, but at least they manage to get the job done and everything seems to be all right for a short while, then pretty much all hell breaks loose. The Yakuza wants their money back and starts tracking down the people responsible for the robbery, and after a while, they even hire two dangerous hitmen to do the job for them. One of the hitmen is Takeshi Kitano and this guy always makes killing someone look easy, but he's perfect for the part though and is probably the best thing Gonin has to offer. At first the very plot might seem a bit confusing, but once you get into it, it's easy to follow. While Gonin really may have nothing new to offer and plays out like your normal Yakuza/Gangsters type of film, the violence is sometimes pretty exciting and the rawishness of how it all plays out kinda makes it hard to look away, or be bored for that matter, but eventually the film just becomes a bit too dark. In the end, Gonin is not a great film but is decent enough and works all right for most the time, and while it might not leave a strong impression, it's still not totally unmemorable. But if that's a good thing, I'm not sure.
The characters in Gonin are of the strangest kind and it's hard to get to know them on a deeper level. The thing with basically all the people in it are that they're just too darn weird for one to be able to relate the least bit to any of them. They do things and act in a certain way that sometimes makes no sense at all, and while that may be both funny and different, it also makes it hard to really get into the film and feel strongly about what goes on. There are fights breaking out way too often for no aparent reasons whatsoever which sometimes makes it feel that Takashi Ishii just wants to show violence for the sake of just showing violence, like he gets off on it or something. Sure, it makes the film more lively and raw, but is it always necessary?.. I think not. The combination of violence and homosexuality that are the constant factors of the film sometimes just becomes too much, and since it never really goes anywhere, one wonders what Ishii really wanted to do with this movie. I'm not saying that the film is bad, but what it is, is extremely weird and in the end not that rewarding.
Gonin must be one of the weirdest Yakuza films I've seen to date and I guess that both makes it good and bad. It is entertaining and it's never really boring either, but the characters are too strange and extremely hard to relate to and it has too much unnecessary violence in it that doesn't make sense, and it's hard to think of a good reason to why it's there in the first place. In the end Gonin works, but could've been a lot better.. well, you be the judge.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: The Five
MOVIE YEAR: 1995
DIRECTOR: Takashi Ishii
WRITING CREDITS: Takashi Ishii
GENRE: Action, Drama, Crime
CAST: Koichi Sato, Masahiro Motoki, Takeshi Kitano
COUNTRY: Japan
RUNTIME: 109 min
RATING: 5/10
Gonin Website/IMDB Click here
Gonin Trailer Click here
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