Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

grantss A rookie police detective has his service pistol stolen. He sets off to find the thief, unravelling a complex web of criminals in the process.A earlyish-career movie from the famed Akira Kurosawa, and it shows, to an extent. Long-winded, with scenes that seem to exist only to take up space. The soldier scenes and baseball scenes are good examples - seem to go on forever and don't add much. The plot seems complex just for complexity's sake - the case was simpler than the movie made out. This said, there is a decent amount of intrigue and Kurosawa does build the tension well. Just a pity editing and dynamism weren't priorities.

Jugu Abraham A film noir or a film with metaphors of dogs and rain? The panting dog in the opening credits is forgotten until the tracking down of the man with the stolen gun. At that point, the senior cop draws upon the metaphor of a mad dog walking straight to its target (visuals of a straight railway track are shown). What Kurosawa and his co-scriptwriter does not explain is how the panting dog, obviously suffering from the oppressive humidity and heat, becomes a "mad" dog. The junior cop also refers to the man he is tracking down as a "mad" dog. Can oppressive humidity contribute to mad criminal actions? When the tracked man is caught, he howls like a dog--not necessarily as a "mad" dog but a sad dog. Rain and rain clouds abound in Kurosawa films (e.g., "Rashomon") and this film is no exception.The script's highlight was the cabaret dancer feeling sorry for her lover because she had expressed a desire for a lovely expensive dress she could never buy. This remark is the catalyst for a crime. She realizes it and wishes she had had the guts to steal money to buy it. She rebukes the economic disparity and finds empathy in the junior cop for her outburst.The next best sequence was a lady criminal, who was not able to shake off a persistent junior cop all day, finally offering him cold beer and food and helping him out with a clue.

bbrooks94 Probably my favourite Kurosawa. A detective (Toshiro Mifune) pursues a misguided, angst ridden criminal who has stolen his (detectives) gun and subsequently killed using it. He joins up with a Chief Detective (Takashi Shimura, my favourite actor) and from then on the two find themselves getting closer and closer to finding the elusive and rampant 'stray dog'. It's a very surprising noir in many ways. Gritty, relentless, brutal, results of the police work often unsatisfactory. Kurosawa uses the increasingly sweltering heat of the summer to portray the frustration building up in all the various characters. It is conventional however, in many a sense, and often follows the guidelines of any other noir ('young, inexperienced cop meets older, wiser cop', 'love interest of victim refuses to help at first but succumbs to guilt'). Ultimately though, Kurosawa's experimental technique and excellent ability to tell a captivating story full of memorable set pieces (baseball scene, ending scene, telephone scene...) from start to finish make this a truly wonderful crime drama. One of the best, in fact.

ducdebrabant I wish everybody who thinks owning a handgun is unqualified as a right and trivial as a responsibility would watch this film, in which Toshiro Mifune, a cop, gets his Colt stolen on a streetcar and spends the rest of the movie trying to get it back. First it falls into the hands of an illicit gun dealer who rents it out (in return for a ration card) for a crime that a first-time criminal doesn't have the nerve to commit. When the dealer is busted and the gun fortuitously remains in the hands of the failed criminal, a robbery is committed with it, and then a robbery/murder. Turns out the criminal is of the same generation as Mifune, a veteran like Mifune, and they have simply taken different paths in the squalor and chaos (meticulously depicted) of postwar Japan.Mifune ends up seconding a wily veteran cop on the case (Takashi Shimura, who played Mifune's doctor/mentor in the star's first film for Kurosawa, "Drunken Angel"), and a series of mounting climaxes follows. The entire story happens to take place in the middle of a cruel and universally demoralizing heat wave, punctuated at times by heavy but ineffectual rainstorms.Has there ever been a more charismatic movie star than Mifune? First of all, he's beautiful here, in the almost gaunt style of the very early Gregory Peck, but he also has the idiomatic look of a samurai on a painted screen, his features uncannily reproducing a classical style of art, and his eyebrows arching in a way we've seen a thousand times in art but rarely in life.And his acting is so laceratingly felt and real. This is one of those times when a sensibility profoundly Japanese (the young cop's sense of personal responsibility and shame) figures in a Kurosawa film, and yet we westerners are able to identify strongly with it -- even as Shimura and the partners' superiors act as voices of reason and experience, and tell Mifune at every turn that it's useless, no matter what the circumstances, to blame anyone but the fugitive.The gun had seven bullets when it was stolen, and the movie makes Mifune (and us) conscious of the remaining number after each occasion the gun is used. The breathless climax of the film -- a chase and a final duel -- begins with three bullets still in the shooter's clip and Mifune unarmed. Kurosawa makes us feel something for everybody. A hardened female pickpocket turns out to have a humane side. A gun-dealer's moll basically has the mind of a child, and Shimura is able to ingratiate himself with a judicious use of popsicles and cigarettes. The first victim (whom we never meet) is a woman whose dowry is stolen after she has waited 10 years to accumulate enough to marry. The second victim is a beautiful newlywed, whose devastated husband then smashes her tomato plants for the offense of being alive, and ripe.And by the time we meet the shooter, we feel we know him. We never do hear him speak, but all through the last few climactic minutes we are in both his head and Mifune's. The whole movie has been spiritually and physically oppressive on all the characters, and the final sequence literally exhausts the pursuer, the pursued, and the audience. Then there comes a quiet epilogue between the two cops in a hospital room, to let us collect ourselves. What a good movie!