In short: The Most Dangerous Game (1978)

Original title: 最も危険な遊戯 (Mottomo kiken na yuugi)

When he’s not working, Shohei Narumi (Yusaku Matsuda) is a drunken louche who loses money and probably teeth gambling and seems to spend more time crawling drunkenly than walking. When hired for a job, he turns into an ice-cold professional assassin and all-round mercenary.

Right now, a gang of crooks is kidnapping executives of various successful Japanese companies. Most of them come back alive once the gangsters have been paid; there are, however, a couple of cases where the abducted are killed. A large company with a fat government defence contract believes the kidnapping and the blackmail are actually only a smokescreen for the murders, and these murders are the way of an enemy company to put them out of business. Narumi is hired to rescue the newest kidnapped; when that doesn’t quite work out but our hero racks up an impressive body count, his new mission is to assassinate the company head responsible for the kidnappings.

Yusaku Matsuda is apparently beloved as a particularly cool example of Japanese 70s machismo. While he’s certainly not boring to watch (though his films, the one at hand a case in point, tend to overdo his sunglasses by night shtick), he’s never been quite on the level of guys like Sonny Chiba or Bunta Sugawara for me. But then, the films he was in weren’t as a group quite as good or as crazy as the best or most memorable works featuring these two gentlemen so that might have been the actual problem.

Be that as it may, this doesn’t mean this, the first film of Toru Murakawa’s “Game” trilogy about Matsuda’s adventures as Shohei Narumi, is not an entertaining film to watch, particularly if you enjoy Japanese 70s exploitation and genre films. While Murakawa isn’t one of the most stylish, nor of the most excessive, nor the most original directors of this sort of Men’s Adventure fare, this still is a late 70s Toei production, so the photography is just the right mix of grime and style, the score tchicka tchicks well, the acting by the usual expected faces is professional in the good sense of the term, the action fun and a bit bloody, and the pacing impeccable, the film hitting all the required beats of the genre like clockwork yet without ever feeling quite as mechanical as I might make it sound.

Not surprisingly if you know Japanese cinema of the era, one of those beats is alas the nearly mandatory scene of our protagonist starting to rape a woman, who quickly begins to enjoy it and from then on falls madly in love with what we must assume is his magical penis (alas, there’s no scene where Narumi trains said organ by hitting it with various appliances, Tomisaburo Wakayama-style). I’ve seen the abominable trope done worse in Japanese cinema of the era, but if that’s the sort of thing that’ll sour you on a film completely, take this as a warning.


Otherwise, The Most Dangerous Game is a typical, fun, violent bit of filmmaking with a great finale that’s certainly not one of the strongest examples of its genre but which is much too enjoyable to ever be called middling.