Critics reviews

This challenging, extremely violent, ravishing-looking, intricately plotted adaptation by Kitano of his novel is of interest for its fresh take on a musty genre. That said, [Kubi] could feel like a slog to watch for viewers who aren’t fans of sword-wielding, screaming samurai movies.

Kitano struggles to juggle all the characters and a climactic showdown is delivered without much fanfare. But Kubi is often wildly funny in Kitano’s straight-faced style, and it’s never less than a lot of fun. Fans of visceral, cynical action movies will lose their heads over it.

“Kubi” is pure bloody thrills through and through, reveling in a kind of Monty Python-esque humor... For a director in his late 70s, Kitano stages this blood-soaked epic with the intoxicating energy of an artist who’s only just getting started. We can only be grateful, then, that Kitano is only just shifting gears.

Kitano’s filmmaking ends up about as over-eager as his scheming characters. Whatever he has to say about power structures, about queer-ness, and about zealous aspirations, he says both clearly and quickly into the movie’s 131-minute running time, so his story ends up back-ended by a repetitive display of surprise attacks and a myriad of pathos-free set pieces that feel practically indistinguishable.

Kubi seems to want to be a rousing samurai movie while simultaneously undermining the whole genre. Alas, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo still remains one of the few films ever to have pulled that act off successfully.

Even as it routinely threatens to get lost in a head-spinningly knotty plot, the director’s kinetic approach and gallows humor makes Kubi a singular addition to Kitano’s oeuvre.

When we talk of “late style,” we generally think of movies that are stripped-down, austere, deliberately paced; Kitano seems to be going in the opposite direction, god bless him... He has always had a penchant for violence, but he seems to have entered a particularly despairing period, creating works whose relentlessness and absurd body counts serve as their own form of reflection.