Critics reviews

Shield of Straw feels like the work of a renewed formalist and theorist. The colors and compositions are intense and near-mathematically precise.

Shield of Straw has a lot going for it, particularly a very basic scenario that allows for the concatenation of a great many set-pieces and not a lot of unnecessary connective tissue. It's about getting from Point A to Point B without getting killed, and without knowing who is going to turn on you at any given moment. This fundamental purity, a hallmark of genre work from Walter Hill and John Carpenter straight through to Kinji Fukasaku and Edgar Wright, is exploited with grace and economy here.

[Shield of Straw] was a desultory offering; bereft of the delirious madness of his best work, it is a sub-par film which in no way distinguishes itself from any of the low-rent action movies perpetually churned out by the most mercenary tendencies within Hollywood.

Shied of Straw" starts on an unlikely note only to grow more amusingly outlandish, though in truth its story isn't much different from the silly sorts that often fill in the gaps between explosions in standard-issue blockbusters.

The result is a suspenseful and largely enjoyable B-movie that lacks some narrative cohesion thanks to Miike's maverick approach to genre filmmaking... It's hard to immerse yourself in the film's emotional fabric when your attention is constantly being diverted by the furious pacing and glaring plot holes.

Miike, as usual, has little time for plausibility or exposition. Within minutes the audience has been briefed on the case and thrown head-first into the pursuit, with the film climaxing early on with an incredible tanker-trunk chase that ends as explosively as one might expect. This is essentially Miike giving his fans exactly what they crave on the biggest canvas possible.

Philosophical speculation isn't really [the film's] strong suit, alas, and the third act gets bogged down in anguished self-doubt, prompting nostalgia for the fleet efficiency Miike demonstrated early on. There's a nifty, preposterously entertaining 90-minute thriller buried in this two-hour-plus behemoth, and I suspect that we'll see that film, in English, somewhere down the road. In the meantime, though, enough of it is discernible in the original version to provide an exhausting good time.

Pretty much all of the action in prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike's distended Shield of Straw comes up front (the picture peaks with a vehicle-demolishing sequence in which a nitroglycerine-loaded truck plows through a police convoy). The rest of the running time is given over to mostly monotonous moralizing about vengeance, principles, and what a life—even that of a killer—is worth in the grand scheme.