Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

arclt I've got little to say other than I am a movie buff and This may be the best movie I have ever seen. Oh, I have been watching movies for 60 years. Just in case someone thinks I haven't seen anything.

Kirpianuscus for a lover of old classic cinema, a must see. for a story about duty, past and duty. for inspired script and for the smart use of clichés. and, sure, for Robert Mitchell in a role who seems be perfect for him. because Japan of "Yakuza" has the gift to be a complex and realistic portrait . traditions, history, crime, the war against a powerful organization. and, sure, an admirable story of friendship. short, one of films for see it time by time.

billcr12 The Yakuza are members of the Japanese Mafia. They make our American version seem like school girls by comparison. Robert Mitchum is a sort of every man who drifts from job to job, just getting along. An old friend appears asking for a favor. He is a wheeler dealer named George (Brian Keith) whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Yakuza for reneging on an arms deal with them. Harry (Mitchum) travels to Japan to rescue George's kid. In the process, he set off a mob war. He also reunites with an old flame and her daughter. The violence is what one would expect from this kind of film, with guns, knives and swords used frequently. Mitchum is his usual cool self, taking over every scene. The supporting cast are all good and The Yakuza is a fun ride for two hours.

Edgar Soberon Torchia Two good scriptwriters and a filmmaker whose highest achievement was perhaps the comedy "Tootsie", add to a rather flat and artificial film that is neither a thriller nor a yakuza film, but a complex drama about ethics (with historical resonance, not only of Japan, but of the US-Japan relations) that could have been much better in capable hands. Writer Paul Schrader followed this with his script for Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver", while Robert Towne had already written Hal Ashby's "The Last Detail" and --also in 1974-- Roman Polanski's "Chinatown": "The Yakuza" proves how good Scorsese, Ashby and Polanski were, and that Sydney Pollack was a standard filmmaker. I admit that I never liked his films. I even walked out of "Bobby Deerfield". But after all these years, reading or hearing good things about "The Yakuza", I decided to give it a try. In the opening credits, Dave Grusin's supposedly hip score starts the distortion of a tale that, in essence, unravels as it goes through an intricately sinuous labyrinth to reflect on dignity, love, ethics, tradition, betrayal, resentment, death; and furthermore, as I previously suggested, it insinuates, perhaps inadvertently, the bad conscience of a few American citizens who witnessed the assault on Japanese culture by American politicians and military men after the end of Second World War (a subject intelligently dealt by Shohei Imamura in "Vengeance Is Mine"), not to mention the barbaric physical harm done with nuclear bombs. Some persons have also suggested a graver cultural distortion in Pollack's romanticized vision of the Japanese gangsters (for a more reliable portrait of the seedy yakuzas, see "Minbo no onna", the film for which its director Juzo Itami supposedly lost his life), but as the time ran, I could not care less. "The Yakuza" became worse, and when a night club scene arrived in which a singer performed a ballad about the yakuza code, I knew I only had two options. I saw it completely… unfortunately a few days after watching Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece "Harakiri".