Boiling Point (1990)

Director: Takeshi Kitano (Beat Takeshi)
Starring: Yûrei Yanagi, Yuriko Ishida, Gadarukanaru Taka, Bengal, Beat Takeshi

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Here's a film that similar in tone to Takeshi's Brother. It's got the offbeat comedy in Takeshi's Kikujiro with the action of a typical Takeshi cop film or a Woo action film. Boiling Point, however, is first and foremost a comedy, and it's a damn funny comedy at that. The posters for the film are extremely misleading. They prominently feature Takeshi and a gun. Takeshi--and guns for that matter--are only in the film for about twenty minutes or half an hour. The film primarily follows kind of a quiet dorky kid in his late teens or early twenties. For the first 45 minutes of screen time, the plot revolves around the trouble this kid gets into with girls, with his baseball team, with the Yakuza, etc. None of this trouble takes precedence over any other, however, and we mostly just watch the kid's life, and I'll be damned if it isn't some funny shit. Does the quiet kid try to attack a Yakuza member for no good reason? Yep. Does the punkass rich kid learn a bloody lesson...twice? Yep. Is the coach unreasonably aggressive? You betcha. Is Takeshi comic gold everytime he's on screen? Without a doubt. Yeah there's some violence. It's a Takeshi film. Expect there to be something violent in it, even if it's just Takeshi smacking around people who don't deserve it (that, too, happens in this movie). While I would see Violent Cop if given a chance, I would actively seek out Boiling Point. It's just a funny, bloody, good time even if the title is only tenuously tied to the events of the film.

July 1
New Beverly Cinemas, late evening

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