Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage

The film that launched Toei’s V-Cinema line and inspired an entire industry. This is action cinema at its purest: a procession of shoot-outs, car chases and explosions, set in harbour docks, night-time streets, nightclubs and warehouses. Never a dull moment!

The film firmly belongs in the pre-John Woo era, with bandana-sporting alpha-male heroes inevitably recalling Stallone and Schwarzenegger in their heyday. Pop singer Sera Masanori plays, inevitably, a traumatised cop named Joe, who joins forces with his former nemesis, a fugitive named Bruce, against the nefarious kingpin who kills Joe’s partner in the opening scene (a brief appearance from the future King of V-Cinema, Takeuchi Riki.)

More interesting than the cookie-cutter plot is the film’s intentional blurring of national identity: Joe is an officer in the “Little Tokyo” police department and drives an American patrol car through a space populated largely by non-Asian extras. This places Crime Hunter in a long tradition of “borderless action” films, most famously exemplified by the 1960s cinema of Suzuki Seijun. As “a film that will not be fast-forwarded”, Crime Hunter is never less than effective and its brief running time means it never grows stale, delivering precisely what it promises.

– Tom Mes

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