Tuff: Part 1

An aimless young man delivering pizza stumbles onto an underworld massacre carried out by a single hitman. Deeply impressed by the killer’s skill, he volunteers to become his apprentice. He learns quickly but his new vocation leads him into worlds he never imagined.

As ideal vehicles for stoic masculine heroes played by handsome male stars, the hitman movie was a common genre in the early years of V-Cinema. Tuff is no exception, with its lead role for pop singer Kimura Kazuya and future heartthrob Toyokawa Etsushi playing his equally young and handsome nemesis. But this is no cookie-cutter fare.

Harada Masato was a film critic before becoming a journeyman director who made films in both Japan and America, directing everything from the college sports drama Rowing Through to the cyberpunk sci-fi Gunhed. He adds poetic and surreal touches to Tuff’s formulaic premise and peppers it with offbeat characters, oblique camera angles and painterly shot compositions, while providing all the necessary elements of action and violence expected of a hitman film. The film garnered four V-Cinema sequels, plus a final instalment set and shot in the US, released theatrically as Painted Desert. Harada directed all but the second film, before going on to deliver his masterpiece Kamikaze Taxi, one of the best Japanese films of the 1990s.

– Tom Mes