While the natural state of an animated movie from Japan is to use it’s near limitless medium to concoct wild, fantasy worlds, or grim dystopian futures loaded with unfeasibly cool tech, I’ve always been rather impressed by Anime set in the “real” world. Like, what would a sports movie, or a kitchen sink drama, or even a spy movie look like when there is practically no cealing to the visual lengths that cell animation grants you? If your answer was “cool as fuck”, then there’s a good chance you’ve managed to catch a viewing of Osamu Dezaki’s ludicrously stylish thriller, Golgo 13: The Professional, a movie that takes stoic assassins, globe trotting murders and rampant love making to such an exagerated, brooding and twisted degree, by my reckoning, the only other conceivable way you could possibly get close to it if was John Woo and Takeashi Miike did that fingertip touching fusion thing from Dragon Ball Z and then made a Bond film.
Better load up that sniper rifle, you’re about to take a fatal shot right to the adrenal gland.
Whether it comes to effortlessly taking out a target with impeccable aim, or bedding a series of glamorous women, international assassin Golgo 13 rises to the challenge with the same grim, yet slick, sense of professionalism. However, after he carries out a hit on Robert Dawson, the son of near-omnipotent oil baron Leonard Dawson and heir to his gargantuan empire, he finds that the controlling billionaire has dedicated his vast fortune and sizable contacts in the CIA, the FBI and the Pentagon to avenging his son’s death.
However, that doesn’t stop the stony faced killer from performing his day job as he continues to take a string of complex assassinations despite being in constant mortal danger. However, after targeting a cold-blooded, Sicilian Mafia boss known only as Dr. Z and a ex-Nazi official living the high life in San Francisco, Golgo 13 soon finds that after numerous attempts on his life, the blowback from Dawson hit is proving just too costly.
However, targeting the man who is targeting him isn’t going to be as simple as slotting him from three miles away with a high powered rifle as the sheer amount if resources Dawson has thrown at him means that Golgo 13 is going to have to do this up close and personal. But this route had its own problems and even if he can make it past the troops, attack choppers and various other gun totting pawns, he still has to get past a trio of denranged henchmen with lethally creepy abilities. Colour coded, spandex-clad twins, Gold and Silver are going to be a handful and no mistake, but the real threat might be Snake, a toothless, perverted, taffy-limbed lunatic whose skills of annihilating his prey is only matched by his questionable sexual appetites – appetites that are gladly fed by Dawson if it means he can take his son’s killer down.
There’s something about an Anime hitman thriller that seems like a perversely perfect marriage made in heaven. Not only is the genre loaded with monosyllabic lead characters who live their lives as internalised stoic, nomads who are insanely gifted in theory chosen profession, but if any genre would lend itself totally to such a lead, it would be a thriller about a top assassin. Christ, you practically get more points the more withdrawn and enigmatic the main character is and how such a void of a man views such seemingly mundane things as human connection or a code of conduct. With Golgo 13, Dezaki obliges massively, delivering a squinting anti-hero in mirrored sunglasses who has the cold edge of a Connery era Bond and the emotional poker face of a sphynx. The man has no past, no loved ones, no real name and no real reason to be doing what he’s doing other than he’s pretty damn good at doing it and because our lead character is such a blank slate, the movie has the space to build a complex, somewhat episodic thriller around him that sees him embark on a number of equally complicated hit while working around the fact that countless organisations are being leveraged to kill him deader than disco.
What struck me most about Golgo 13 is just how grim and dark the movie is willing to go. Obviously a lot of Anime from the 80s and 90s were hardly laugh riots, but even by that standard, Dezaki cruel epic excells itself by aggressively shitting on each and every character that finds themselves caught either Golgo’s orbit or crosshairs. In fact, to quote a famous poster, the lucky ones die first as the sub-plot of the obsessive Dawson offering up his widowed daughter in law as sexual payment to the genuinely repellent Snake, or having his infant Granddaughter trained up to be a crack-shot to be the world’s most unlikely assassin is impeccably grim, even for Japanese animation.
However, it also perfectly fits in this coldly barbaric world of agents and killers and Dezaki makes this dangerous existence as sexy as hell thanks to having his crew animate the loving shit out of the whole deal. The head shots are practically orgasmic as bullets tear through hair, bone and brain matter; blood erupts like a geyser from a sucking chest wound only to spray its owner with a light shower of of their own gore and the flesh wounds are so deep you can practically taste their blood type through the screen. But on top of that, the movie visually refuses to sit still, throwing such things as slow-mo, freeze frame, split screen, crazy angles and even x-ray shots in a manner that invokes Brian De Palma tripping balls on speed. In fact, a bravura sequence that sees Golgo 13 attempt an impossible shot between two buildings with a third skyscraper blocking the way utilises virtually all of them, even deploying a whizzing, bullet’s eye view and dragging mere miliseconds out into exhilarating minutes.
However, the Bond influence really kicks in when the villains come out to play and while 007 had to contend with the likes of Oddjob, Jaws and a barrel chested Robert Shaw, he never had to deal with a serpent themed rapist with razor sharp yo yos; neither did he have to throw down with a pair of shiny-themed war criminals who aim blows at unhealed injuries with gauntlets made of pure gold and giggle like school girls when they draw blood. On top of all that, there’s quite the impressive twist in the tale too in concerns to who actually hired Golgo 13 in the first place that goes to some surprisingly emotional placed. Of course, our hero is there to fuck shit up with a final bullet that ranks as one of the most impressive dick moves of the genre.
It’s all complete bollocks of course, but the fact that the animation manages to exagerate everything to such an exquisite degree and physics goes right put of the window at a moments notice means that it also proves to be a brutally hard edged action epic that dutifully sticks to the gentleman spy/hitman format (sexy locations, frequently nude women, a lot of turtleneck fashions) while injecting everything with the type of hyperbolic bloodshed Anime flicks in the 80s delivered with gusto. Simply put: the R-rated Sean Connery Bond film you’ve always yearned for.
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