Film: Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler
Release date: 26th July 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 130 mins
Director: Tôya Satô
Starring: Kenichi Matsuyama, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Tarô Yamamoto
Genre: Thriller/Drama/Action
Studio: 4Digital
Format: DVD
Country: Japan
Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler is adapted from Nobuyuki Fukukoto’s multi-million selling manga series Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji, and follows the fortunes of a down on his luck layabout coerced into entering a series of increasing bizarre games of chance.
Tatsuya Fujiwara (Death Note, Battle Royale) takes the lead role as Kaiji, a mid-twenties graduate seeking solace through alcohol, as he stumbles through life working in a dead-end job that fails to stimulate his mind or improve his social standing.
After another soul destroying day, he is visited by an attractive dark-haired debt collector named Endo (Yuki Amami) and informed that he is responsible, as acting guarantor, for a missing friend’s sizeable loan. The choice given to him is to spend the next decade trying, without any resources, to honour the loan payments, or to board the Espoir gambling cruise ship for a once in a lifetime opportunity to clear his debt and gain wealth beyond his wildest dreams.
Initially the game (“paper-rock-scissors”) seems like a straightforward three card contest based on little more than luck. However, strategy soon moves to the forefront when the contestants realise that their very lives are on the line. Many panic, plead and cheat, as dark personality traits emerge in a desperate frenzy of self-preservation. Unlike Steve McQueen in the Cincinnati Kid or Newman and Redford in The Sting, Kaiji is not a naturally gifted card player, yet he is different - he learns, he adapts and, after initially falling prey to an unsavoury trick, he develops a seemingly unbeatable tactical game plan.
However, the whole scenario is an elaborate con designed to force the men into a lifetime of servitude to a shadowy underworld organisation. Once under their control, Kaiji must risk everything and enter two further competitions or die a slow death caused by enforced manual labour...
Director Toya Sato, who started his career making shows for Nippon Television, spends an almost unbearable amount of time between the first gambling scenario and the second trying to set up a fairly simplistic idea: Gangsters need a labour force, con desperate men, offer some hope of freedom through high stack gambling games – simple. Yet, it takes half the movie to properly establish the plot. It is certainly a case of less would have been more; as cutting thirty minutes from the dull opening half would have improved the over feel and pace of the movie.
At times, Toyo Sato seems to think he still has the luxury of his television background by setting aside a sizeable chunk of the movie’s running length attempting and failing to properly develop the characters. Kaiji begins and ends the movie as a good intentioned yet annoying character; Tonegawa (Teruyuki Kagawa) the right hand man to a one dimensional white bearded gangster leader is nothing more than cartoon character bad guy; and with one exception (Endo), there are no substantial character arcs. Even then, Endo’s morph from ‘baddy’ to ‘goody’, and partially back again, is clearly signposted.
The actors often overact to the point of distraction, while the director appears to show a lack of confidence in their ability by utilising internal monologues to display emotion rather than subtle facial expressions. This method is detrimental to the otherwise rollercoaster pace of the movie’s keenly crafted second half, which is kick-started into life by a genuinely tense race between two hotels on a suspended steel beam during a thunder storm. From this scenario onwards, Toya Sato plays to his strengths, and an underlying talent comes to the fore.
The final gambling scenes are exciting and uniquely executed with intelligent camerawork emphasising the heightened emotion, as it shifts between characters, picking up each facial tick and psychological nuance from actors now, thankfully, well and truly reeled in by a director relishing in his task. Second guessing tricks and tactics becomes a joy during a finale that is the epitome of fingernail biting edge-of-your-seat cinema.
If you can survive the ill-judged opening salvo this develops into an exciting piece of throwaway moviemaking. MG
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