Shoot or shield

Review Action thriller

SHIELD OF STRAW (PG13)

DURATION: 117 minutes
RATING: 3.5/5
Opens on 12th September

The story: The murder of a seven-year-old girl shocks Japan. The prime suspect is paedophile Kiyomaru (Tatsuya Fujiwara), who is on the run. The girl's grandfather, industrialist Ninagawa (Tsutomu Yamazaki), offers 1 billion yen (S$12.7 million) to anyone who kills him. Kiyomaru, left without allies, turns himself in to the Fukuoka police. An elite team of five seemingly incorruptible cops, including Shiraiwa (Nanako Matsushima) and Mekari (Takao Osawa), is sent to protect him from a nation gone mad with greed and hate as the accused travels the 1,200km to custody in Tokyo.

Prolific and controversial director Takashi Miike proved with the samurai drama 13 Assassins (2010) that he could do big, conventional action scenes. That skill is put to the test here every few minutes when ordinary citizens - both civilians and those in uniform - take a run at the accused paedophile-murderer with every tool imaginable.

This efficient and well-crafted action thriller has moments that surprise and a nicely twisty plot, but does not do anything remarkable with the well-worn theme of cops who run a deadly gauntlet for the sake of duty.

The baby-faced and slender actor Fujiwara, playing the handcuffed and hobbled man, deserves a special award for being in the most number of scenes in recent memory in which an actor is given a thrashing.

The 53-year-old Miike is best known for works marked by intense cruelty and body horror (Audition, 1999; Ichi The Killer, 2001), but his talent runs to a much wider palette than arthouse examinations of the dark side of the human mind.

In this work, nominated for the top prize of the Palme D'or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Miike works with a script adapted from a novel.

The characters are stock - the shouty top cop, the young and idealistic new boy in uniform, the older and more cynical senior.

The five heros, comprised of ramrod-straight big-city professionals and their more relaxed country cousins, make up the force that bicker and question one another's allegiances at several points on the gruelling journey. Unfortunately, these cycles of bicker-shoot guns-death scene become repetitive towards the end of the film.

Movies like this can be tricky to translate from page to camera. In a novel, the transition from quiet bystander to attacker can be done in a straightforward manner. On film, however, sudden character transformations - pram-pushing mums who whip out machine guns or frail old people who start stabbing, for example - can be unintentionally comic if not done properly.

Miike proves he can set up a scene like that without losing the shock to unwanted giggles.

That ability to switch tone, from normal to grotesque in a heartbeat, is a Miike strong point and this is a watchable if workman-like telling of the fortress-under-siege story.

johnlui@sph.com.sg

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