#7 Is Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage the perfect action movie?

The other day I saw the movie Crime Hunter: Bullets of Rage from 1989 by Shundō Okawa. It's this 59 minute action film that was made dirt-cheap and features a police officer called Joker whose partner gets killed while arresting a criminal called Bruce. They arrest him because he stole 5 million dollars of donations from a church, so after Joker gets out of the hospital - the scene in the hostpital is so damn funny - he sets out to get Bruce, and he is helped by a nun called Lily. Halfway through the movie Bruce kidnaps Lily and Joker goes after them, but they end up teaming up to defeat a bunch of corrupt police officers who want to steal the money. Bruce gets killed, and then Lily also gets shot down by a detective who at first helped Joker out, but now claims that "Everybody needs cash." Joker throws a grenade at him, and the movie ends with him carrying out Lily's body.

After the movie finished, there was a short Q&A with the director and one of the producer, where in they told us that one of the reasons that the movie is so short, is that Toei wanted them to make an action movie where nobody would fast-forward through all of the slow parts. Their solution was to eliminate all of the parts that I am guessing people normally skip in an action movie: I think there isn't a single scene of dialogue that's longer than two minutes, and the only one that is longer features Bruce holding a guy at gunpoint while said guy is heaving sex with a woman. (The scene ends with him giving Bruce a huge present with a bow on it and all, which later turns out to have a grenade launcher inside - did I say this movie is kind of stupid already? Cause it is.) The movie really does seem to fly by, and at the end I got a pretty good grasp of most of the characters and of the almost non-existant plot, but the director's comment did make me think about how important I find dialogue and exposition in action movies.

If I had to make a list of my favorite action movies, I would probably put Terminator 2 on top of the list, along with The Matrix and maybe something like Tokyo Fist or Army of Darkness (more on that movie later), but both of those I am hesitant to call action movies™. Action is kind of a difficult genre to pin down in general: when I looked through my highest rated movies on Letterboxd, most of the movies I gave five starts that have a lot of action in them aren't really action movies: stuff like Star Wars: A New Hope is more sci-fi, Apocalypse Now is more of a war movie and Princess Mononoke is clearly fantasy. I guess you could argue the same about Terminator 2, or even say that Crime Hunter is more of a police movie, but still, those movies are very cleary action-centered to me. [1] Maybe it's more of an intuitive thing, I guess.

I think the thing that sets action movies apart from other genres, is the fact that the action is the main source of enjoyment, instead of for example the drama or the detectivework. A friend pointed out to me that in all of my favorite action movies, there is something other than the action that seems the most appealing, some deeper meaning or idea, like the idea of the terminator or the idea of living inside of a simulation. This seems plausable. After all, mindless action is not very interesting - otherwise the greatest action movie would be a compilation of bar fights [2] - meaning that the appael of mosts popular action movies is either something other than the action, or the combination of the action and something else. The first part doesn't seem very logical to me, because we do see action as a specific genre or catagory of movies, meaning that the most likely theory to me is that the appeal of action movies is their combination of action and something else. That 'something else' is the plot or the idea behind the movie: if the Matrix was just a movie about living in a simulation, it would probably be a drama or thriller (or maybe even horror) movie, but the fact that it features action and especially the fact that the kind of action it features flows out of the fact the movie is in a simulation, makes it an action movie.

What then is this other thing besides the action that makes Crime Hunter so good? I think it is the humor that can be found in it. It's a hilarious movie, due to the over the top acting and the very funny special effects. What makes the movie so interesting is that the action doesn't flow out of those funny parts, but the funny parts flow out of the action: the action is the funny part, most of the time. During the Q&A someone actually asked if the intention of the movie was to be funny, and Okawa said it wasn't; all of it was supposed to be very serious, and he theorized that this dimention of comedy was specific to western audiences, since he never had a reaction like that back in Japan when the movie came out. In this aspect the movie differs from another film that I kept thinking of, that is also hilarious while also being a master of another genre: the Evil Dead series.

In the Evil Dead series, the horror and the comedy don't exist side by side.

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