Critics reviews

"Violent Cop" is not for the squeamish. But for fans of unsentimental police action rooted in commentary on a society, "Violent Cop" packs a punch.

Violent Cop came out in 1989 and, back then, many fans were taken aback by the sheer brute force of his storytelling. Few were prepared for this side of Kitano – after all, in the early 1980s, studio audiences laughed so hard at his jokes it was often impossible to catch what he was saying at all. All of a sudden, it seemed he had shed all congeniality to morph into a filmmaker.

To Kitano, violence is cartoonish, unreal, and absurd... With its incongruously whimsical score and deadpan humour Violent Cop never shies away from life’s absurdity, but has only a lyrical sadness for those seeking to numb the pain in a world of constant anxiety.

It’s the clashes between Kitano’s still, protracted, and quiet “default” style with unexpected camera movements, cuts, and noises that make these explosions—of comedy and/or violence—burst into being.

Kitano crafted a style that oscillated between deadpan poetry and bursts of surreal violence, using his own stoic (but somehow still strangely expressive) visage as both aesthetic and narrative device.

As vicious as its title suggests, Violent Cop nonetheless boasts a wit typical of its director/star Takeshi "Beat" Kitano, a former stand-up comedian who laces his behind-the-camera debut—which he took the reins of after the initial director backed out—with a dry humor that enhances its bleak brutality.

[T]his formulary material makes for electrifying entertainment in the hands of Takeshi Kitano... who stars and directs. The whole movie is imbued with his personality, a mix of stubborn pig-headedness, blatant prejudices, committed violence, and hard, self-deprecatory humour. It's also superbly paced.

A painter's approach to cinema, or perhaps a sculptor's, chisel stabs and all: To compose and to disfigure are the braided aesthetic ends, the grinning vagabond in the opening image is a dark-toned still life promptly disrupted by off-screen vandals. Borrowing money for bets when not taunting a suspect into taking a bullet, Kitano's detective is an unblinking comic force continuously swatting at his corrupt surroundings.

And as gripping as Violent Cop is in other respects, it suffers from a lack of complexity, both in its story's structure and in its point of view.

[H]e's [Takeshi] scary, hilarious and, in a strange way, touching. But his "ultra-dark" comedy will offend the oversensitive.