The Execution Game (1979)

Original title: 処刑遊戯 (Shokei yugi)

With the help of a Woman who doesn’t even move her mouth in the proper moments when singing playback in a bar, a mysterious group lures everyone’s favourite asshole professional killer Shohei Narumi (Yusaku Matsuda) into a trap. They knock him out, kidnap him and them torture him a bit. Afterwards, they stage a fake escape, apparently to test his murder skills in practice, for what these guys truly want from Narumi is to hire him for a hit. Why you’d first torture him and finish the fake escape opportunity with shooting his gun hand is beyond me, but I am after all not a member of this highly professional and mysterious group.

The choice of target doesn’t seem promising either: it’s an old pro in the professional killing business, and the former favourite killer of the group, not something that should seem to be terribly promising for Narumi’s own future. Later, we will also discover that the old killer was seduced into working for the group by the same woman who pulled in Narumi. Eventually, Narumi agrees to the hit, but of course, the old hitman is not going to be the only one our protagonist will murder.

I’ve decided not to write up The Killing Game, the second film of Toru Murakawa’s second film in his “Game” trilogy about the bloody adventures of professional killer – and perhaps professional asshole too – Shohei Narumi, because what I wrote about the first film in the series, The Most Dangerous Game, also applies to film number two, just that the later movie adds some pretty horrible comic relief and doubles down on the misogynism of the first film.

The third, and for my taste by far the best, entry in the series cuts most of these elements down completely. There’s no comedy at all anymore in the film, we never see Narumi taking on his off-day lazy guy persona, and while the film’s portrayal of its two female characters isn’t exactly progressive, they are much closer to actual people than in the first two films, and given how pared down the characterisation has become here, that’s just as close as the men. In fact, the Woman isn’t quite your standard femme fatale. She certainly works for very violent men and is responsible for luring others into their hands, but she’s also clearly trapped in a world she never chose for herself, looking for outs – be it fleeing with the old killer or begging Narumi to kill her too after she has set the older killer up for his death – she knows won’t save her.

Narumi’s relationship to women has changed too. While nothing of this is ever spoken aloud – as a matter of fact, the film’s characters speak about everything not related to killing only in vague allusions and ellipses – Matsuda’s posture and some of Narumi’s actions make clear that this time around, he isn’t dominating a woman with his “awesome” (actually really unpleasant, of course) masculinity, but can actually fall in love like a real human being. His other contact is a young watch repairwoman who clearly takes a shine to him, and whom he will in the end reject, telling her not to put her trust in strangers too fast; one never knows how dangerous they could be. This might also be the most moral, perhaps kindest, act, Narumi commits in the whole of the series.

Ironically, this increasing depth of the protagonist’s emotional life happens in a film that strips down all clear emotional expression not happening through violence even further than the first two did, Narumi hiding what might be going on in his head behind a stoic pose and under his perpetual sun glasses. However, Matsuda manages to embody greater emotional depth by doing less obvious acting here; while his Narumi still acts cool and likes to pose with his gun in front of a mirror, the coolness does seem very much like armour this time around, Matsuda suggesting with small gestures and changes in his body language quite a few of the things neither his character not the film would ever outright state.

In this context, it is pretty clear that the Woman (whose name I never noticed if the film ever actually uses it) isn’t the only one trapped in a violent world she isn’t allowed to leave here; despite all his capabilities and his talent for violence, this time around Narumi seems just as trapped in his world as she is, his macho coolness a shield that seems the more cracked the less he lets the cracks show.

On the directing side, Murakawa is doing an inspired instead of a routine job for once. Here, every shot seems absolutely focussed on creating a very specific mood of alienation, the framing often trapping characters in their surroundings or keeping them separate and far from each other. From time to time, the film’s generally naturalistic (in a 70s grimy sense) style and colour scheme is replaced by splotches of intense tones of blue or red, suggesting a wrongness to some of the film’s most violent moments in the series typical scenes of Narumi systematically gunning down a whole gang of enemies. In general, The Execution Game’s action tends more to the systematic than the loudly spectacular, an approach that fits Narumi’s profession as it does the film’s more complex context.


So, quite unexpectedly, I found myself riveted by the final film in the “Game” trilogy, fascinated by its cold aesthetic, interested by the way it frames its tale of alienation, as well as surprised by the clear evidence that Matsuda is a much better actor than I had given him credit for. That’s a pretty fantastic way to end a little franchise.

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.