Takuma Tsurugi is back for the final time in a full-length movie. Tsurugi has been hired by the Owada clan to recover two tape cassette recordings that when played in unison provide a formula for creating synthetic heroin potentially worth a fortune. When Tsurugi gives the tapes over in return for some money, he is double crossed. Naturally he manages to recover the tapes in order to get even more money. Another party who desperately wants these tapes is a crooked District Attorney. The head of the Owada clan gets his sister Aya to try and use her wily feminine ways of getting to Tsurugi. She’ll do anything to achieve her mission and hires a Mexican mariachi illusionist who has a powerful laser weapon to kill Tsurugi.
I was expecting the trilogy to go out on a high but this movie isn’t a patch on the first two although we do get to see Sonny Chiba’s character get defeated for the first time in a fight which was unexpected to say the least though he does get a 2nd chance later on to even the score. A familiar face to Japanese exploitation movies of the 70’s who has a significant role in this movie is none other than Reiko Ike. She gets to show us her considerable charms on more than one occasion! A disappointing factor was the majority of the brutality we had seen in the previous movies were practically gone except for the last scene where he kills his opponent by ripping his heart out with his bare hands (let’s see now – that’s ripping somebody’s testicles out in one movie and then popping someone’s eyes in another and now this!). There’s generally less action in the movie, and the fight scenes feel a bit lacklustre when they do occur. Sonny Chiba still busts out some cool moves and there are some impressively long takes, but it feels a bit like they want to get the fights out of the way so they can focus on the story when it really should be the other way round. The movie also lacks a really good villain. It seems that Tsurugi has turned into more of a Bond-like character who lives in a high-tech apartment and has an impressive variety of face masks to aid him in his tasks. The character of Tsurugi has definitely evolved over the course of the trilogy – he was an anti-hero thug in the first movie and by this one he’s more of a likeable spy character who has softened up a bit. I think doing that was a mistake. We get to see some truly unexplainable scenes which makes you scratch your head such as in a nightclub where he first meets Aya. Tsurugi is accosted by a young girl who works for Owada as a telephonist and passes messages on to him. She grabs him in order to go for a dance and during this Tsurugi puts on a pair of false vampire teeth and says he’s Dracula to scare her off. It serves no purpose to the plot itself and is just bizarre!
Although it contains plenty to keep the majority of viewers more than happy with it’s action and martial arts scenes, I was more disappointed in how much they had toned Tsurugi’s character down. Tsurugi would be back but would only appear in a couple of scenes in Sister Street Fighter.
Sadako’s Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
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