exodusman
Kaiji is an awesome movie. It shown how to play Jan-Ken-Pon (Rock- Paper-Scissors) in Japan which very popular games. Which under the debt pressure, he join the other play in Espoir ship (means Hope in French). This is where he lost, work underground as slave, pay with underground money called Peria, and challenge to join Brave Road (to survive and return above ground).When he made an final, he should play card with Tonegawa. Play E-Card (Emperor-Slave-Citizen) to win his freedom and clearing his debt. He lost because of Tonegawa using cheap trick. Using Chip that control and know the users heartbeat, but he lost cause Kaiji too excited winning the last round and make Tonegawa fallen on his own trick.
george_a_romero
The colourful cast of Death Note (2006) reunite for this inspired manga/anime adaptation. It is a riveting sizzler of a movie made with nerve-jangling Japanese brutality. Kaiji is a down and out thirty-year-old blue-collar loser who has no luck in life. He is bored of his dead-end job at the hypermarket, irritated that pompous and prosperous people drive around in Mercedes and depressed that he never has enough dough to rise above his comatose lifestyle. One day, a debt collector arrives at his flat to offer him the chance to change his empty existence: go on a cruise with other down and outs, gamble, and repay his debts in the ultimate game of deception. If you win, you start your life afresh, if you lose, well, you will never want to fool around with rock-paper-scissors again because Brave Men Road is the only way to escape 15-years of forced underground slave labour.Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (2009) examines the languor of Japanese consumer culture: work, devour, and squander your verve in an everlasting cycle of mass suppression that upholds the lower-class/upper-class divide. This regimented Metropolis style nightmare comes to fruition in the symbolic utopian underground kingdom that blue-collar slave workers must construct for aristocratic city-dwellers. The languid masses march in union, take showers together and buy beer and munchies with their meagre pay to nullify and distract themselves from their authoritarianism. The moral at the heart of Kaiji is simple: if you want to achieve your dreams in this hum/drum existence, you have to wake up, fight, and live recklessly. Would you be willing to walk across an electrified beam between two skyscrapers to pay off your debts while superficial business executives watch you on television screens? If you want to rise above your own worthless comatose lifestyle, why not take up the challenge, you could win lots of money because that is what Brave Men Road is all about, or is it… Verdict: This riveting Battle Royale intoned masterpiece is made with nail-biting suspense, brain-teasing intelligence and mind-blowing wit:-
clumsy1
I know this about Japan, they take everything to the extreme, are a shame culture and are a very conservative people. For them the end goal in life is to get a job for a corporation and work for them forever.This movie does a pretty good job portraying this, as it is about an uneducated vandal who is working minimum wage at a convenience store. He messes with the wrong rich person, a yakuza, who ultimately brings up his past debt which is way more than he can afford. They give him the opportunity to go on a gambling boat to enter a high stakes competition with other "losers" to erase their debt if they win or face the perils of debt slavery.This movie touches on class struggle in a different way than most films. Even though they made the rich people to be bad guys they did touch on why some poor people seem to just be born to lose. What can i say it's the conservative nature of Japan haha it doesn't ever exonerate poor people. It is also a movie about game theory when it comes to the gamblimg games, which any gambler can enjoy.While the expressions and dialogue is kinda ridiculous, like when he's drinking beer/eating yakitori people got to remember this is an adaption from a manga/anime. To me that is the only negative as this is a pretty serious Manga, the Live Action version has unintentional funny moments with the ridiculous expressions.
CountZero313
Out there somewhere, in a parallel universe, the rules of film-making are inverted.Rule number 1: You cannot have too much exposition.Visual storytelling is replaced by dialogue-heavy scenes, the more the better.Rule number 2: Over-acting is better than acting.If you are really thirsty and you drink a beer, you have to close your eyes, look to the heavens, ooh and ah, fall to your knees, and declare out loud how damn GOOD it tastes, all the while talking to yourself. You know, like in a beer commercial.The bad news is, director Toya Sato has escaped from that parallel universe into ours, and brought this clunking, tawdry, disjointed insult to the proud tradition of Japanese cinema with him.The story, such as it is, is that Kaiji has a huge gambling debt and his life is going nowhere. That leads him to becoming the plaything of a misanthropic multi-billionaire building a nuclear shelter using slave labour and with a penchant for life-and-death gambling games.Not a bad premise, but utterly sunk in this execution.If film is stories told by pictures, and the Japanese are a non-verbal culture, could someone please tell me why there is so much TALKING in this film? Kaiji crosses a narrow bridge 200 meters in the air. He looks behind to see that his friend has fallen. The audience can see he has fallen. But Kaiji tells us: "He has fallen." Endo watches a five-card game. The players play three cards, and each play is a draw. They have two cards left. We can see this, but somehow we get to hear Endo's thoughts, which tell us: "After three cards played it is a draw. It is down to the last two cards." Who exactly is this insipid narration for? Is there a retarded baboon wearing earplugs and a blindfold sitting at the back of the theatre that Sato felt the need to accommodate? I have given only two examples, but the whole film is like this. The most glaringly obvious action is either replayed, or explained verbosely by one character to another.Characterization is practically non-existent. Kaiji is a gambler, but where he came from, how he ended up in such a rut, is never mentioned. He empathises with one of his fellow victims, but it is not clear why. At his ostensible moment of triumph, he is celebrating gambling wins and downing a beer - despite the horror of watching all of his comrades in arms falling from the aforementioned narrow bridge. He starts the movie caring only for himself, and finishes it the same way. And we know no more about him.Endo is a gangster but seems taken by Kaiji, even though she is fully complicit in the murder and mayhem games that afflict him. It turns out she is no good, and this puts a period on the film's major failing - there is no one to like. All of the characters start out as reprehensible, and never redeem themselves. They never grow, learn, or reflect.Plotting is flimsy. Kaiji at one point conveniently produces a magic marker to draw with, despite just being released from a dungeon. The dungeon prisoners suddenly get a TV in their cell where no one existed before. At one point, on a ship, a left-over card in the game seals Kaiji's fate. It is a huge moment story-wise, propelling us into the next sequence. But as the game starts with an even number of cards and they are discarded two at a time, it is impossible for there to be one left-over card. Lazy, ill-disciplined scripting at its worst.Pacing is uneven to say the least. The bridge crossing takes an eternity, as Kaiji and his older pal have a sentimental outpouring about their lives so far. Any yet when we come back to the job at hand - crossing the bridge - we find out that the guy on the other bridge has made no progress during the course of the interminable conversation. I mean, what was he doing all this time? Tatsuya Fujiwara overacts furiously. His beer-drinking antics are just shameful, the worst hamming since... well, since the last TV director was allowed to make a Japanese film. Amami is usually classy, but even she can't get out of TV mode and comes across as wooden. Ken'ichi Matsuyama makes a cameo, and seems a class apart, making effective use of that menacing stare of his. Probably because he appears less, he took less direction from Sato, and therefore acts better.Teruyuki Kagawa, usually so reliable and watchable, is dragged under by too-close close-ups, patchy pacing, and the failure to resist cranking it up a couple of notches. A better director would have gotten a better performance, one feels.It is incredulous that with this budget and this cast Kaiji turns out to be so mind-numbingly awful. Based on a comic, with a TV director, didn't someone realise that the element 'cinema' needed to be added to the equation? Sato and friends - go to film school, and learn the basics. Please. Or at least go back to your parallel universe.
