Detective Bureau 2-3 Go To Hell Bastards! [Blu-ray]

great crime thriller from Seijun Suzuki, interesting to see dual 45 pistol handling long before John Woo's A Better Tomorrow. This isn't as arty as Branded To Kill, more similar to Youth of the Beast, but great story and performances.

AS I HAVE BEEN TOLD MANY TIMES BEFORE ,I LIKE ASIATIC MOVIES.THEY ARE SO DIFFERENT FROM THE AMERICAN AND ENGLISH MOVIES.THERE ARE MORE EXITMENT,AN THRILLS MORE.

1963's Go to Hell B-------! Detective Bureau 2-3 is a great fun Nikkatsu noir that may have a standard setup - Jo Shishido's hamster-cheeked private eye infiltrates a yakuza mob for the police to uncover the Mr Big behind it all - but in the hands of director Seijun Suzuki is always more than the sum of its parts. It's not as highly stylised as his later yakuza films despite its wonderfully vivid use of color and the scope frame, but that's not to say that he doesn't cut loose with the odd moment of anarchy. At one point, Suzuki even turns a suspense scene setup - will Shishido's ex-girlfriend unwittingly reveal his true identity in a nightclub? - into a wonderfully unexpected and off the wall musical number with Shishido singing and dancing his way through a comic song with her. There's plenty of action, often with a strong comic-strip vibe, and it's not a huge stretch to see it as something like the Japanese equivalent of a Bond film before they became increasingly spectacular: it's a cool-looking exercise in entertainment that toys with the genre and creates a fantasy world of its own without ever quite overstepping the mark. You may need to check your sense of logic at the door (in one sequence the police are supposedly powerless to arrest the small army of yakuza aiming rifles at the police station because they've all got hunting licenses while the villains thinking nothing of imprisoning the hero in a lockup filled with machineguns!), but that's a small price to pay for this much fun.Kino's NTSC DVD offers a good subtitled 2.35:1 widescreen transfer with only a stills gallery and trailers for Cops vs Thugs and Yakuza Graveyard as extras.