Gonin Saga

Ishii Takashi's legendary Gonin (1995) set the standard for neo-noir Yakuza movies with its tale of five down-on-their-luck men taking on a powerful criminal gang, the Goseikai - and then facing deadly reprisals from two gay hitmen. Twenty-years-later sequel Gonin Saga brings the story up to date. The new film starts by clarifying the messy fall-out from the original fracas and then moves rapidly forward to the present day, focusing on the strained friendship between two young men (one honest, the other not), both sons of men killed in Gonin. Now in his seventies, Ishii is the last of Japan's great genre auteurs, maybe the only Japanese director who can attract an all-star cast to fight their way through stylishly imagined bars, night-clubs and yakuza offices. Along the way, he gives us the ultimate definition of 'Yakuza DNA'. (International Film Festival Rotterdam)