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.