Hopefully after Austen Powers came out in 1997, the same year as Hana Bi, Beat Takeshi realised the clunkiness of exposition. If you want to make a deep film on the desperation of guilt, loyalty to love ones and responsibility it does pay not to have supporting characters in full-on exposition but your lead character/actor being paid by the word. Kitano hardly says any dialogue and occasionally nods or looks at people during long stretches, this conveys nothing. In all honesty, I could do that.

Meanwhile Nishi’s devastated colleague, Horibe, thoughtfully explains in some completely natural dialogue what has happened in between his shooting and the current scene, again in full detail, to his best friend and loyal workmate? Then we have the Yakuza explaining that they are the Yakuza and ‘this is what we do’ to themselves in a meeting. That boat just does not float for me.

A lot of the acting looks stagey and stilted and the casual violence and thuggery of the police will not connect with the audience. In fact Mr.Nishi is a psychotic thug who doesn’t speak to his wife and his answer to everything appears to be some extreme violence, in any normal world he definitely would have been incarcerated by now.

The local Yakuza are comically bad and not in the slightest threatening as simple moves or sleights of hand foil them every time or they send one man to get a debtor who has foiled more than one of the ‘enforcers’ multiple times. Then when Nishi comes back to the car on his own, carrying the enforcer's pistol, they let him get in. The whole film is neither thrilling or logical.

The comic aspect appears to be scrapyard storyline shoehorned in so Tetsu Watanabe can gurn it up in a less than subtle comic turn. It also included a confusing, badly edited, unresolved conflict for this character with the ‘dweeby scared’ man, which confused me.

The film plods along implausible for some time until the finale with Mr.Nishi’s former colleagues ‘come for him’ but he begs a few last moments with his ‘suspiciously not in her final weeks’ wife, who incidentally hardly speaks either it must be riotous in their home. Here we get to see what is apparently a demented child running around and around in a circle with a kite that will not fly and then a kite the Nishi breaks.

The final panning shot accompanied by specific sounds is supposedly profound or sad but just made me think Nishi was even more of cock than he was portrayed throughout the film.

The plus points of the film are some of the beautiful Japanese vistas but the minus points are many. The music appears to be from 1970s US crime shows and does not seem to fit what is playing out in front of your eyes, the acting is strange and mainly poor, the editing is almost random and disjointed and everything seems to say, cheap or made quickly.

Many people say this is a masterpiece, which astonishes me, I like Japanese films and there much better made, better acted, thoughtful and interesting films from that nation out there than this.

Masterpiece is being flung around about a current video game. I’ve seen that from beginning to end, it is not, it is full of plot holes and poorly written, so is Hana Bi I’m sorry to say.

Drop Dead.

Hana-bi (AKA: Fireworks) is written and directed by Takeshi Kitano. It stars Kitano, Kayoko Kishimoto, Ren Osugi and Susumu Terajima. Music is by Joe Hisaishi and cinematography by Hideo Yamamoto.

Yoshikata Nishi (Kitano) is a loose cannon police detective who quits the force after a tragic incident results in his partner, Horibe (Osugi), being confined to a wheelchair. His retirement brings him the time to care more for his seriously ill wife Miyuki (Kishimoto). Nishi can find no peace, though, more so as he has borrowed money from the Yakuza to pay for his wife's needs, and they are growing impatient for the repayment...

Very early in Kitano's superb slice of Japanese neo-noir there is a piece of graffiti on the wall, it says "Drop Dead", while Hisaishi's music is a devilish accompaniment to the scene. It's ominous and foreboding, setting the tone for what is to follow. Pic is deliberately paced, beautifully so, with the opening nonlinear approach and scattergun shifts in time adding a sort of psychological maelstrom to the impending narrative darkness.

Yet to suggest it as a perpetually bleak picture is doing it a small disservice, for Kitano (himself working from a damaged psyche that occurred in real life) has this adroit eye for poetic beauty and human tenderness that marries up with bursts of violence and emotionally shattering passages of play. And it works brilliantly, with stabs of humour also filtering in via the outer frames.

Nishi the character is a force of nature and a walking - brooding - contradiction, a man pained behind his sunglasses, his expressionless visage amazingly still saying so much. When he explodes the impact is doubly strong, mainly because dialogue is so sparse, but the interwoven visuals - very much a Kitano speciality - strike an almighty chord for the story. To which we edge towards the finale, which unsurprisingly brings beauty and infinite sadness.

Unfussy camera work, sabre sharp editing (Kitano & Yoshinori Oota), elegiacal musical arrangements, art, kites and Kitano's intense performance, this rounds out as film making greatness. In fact, a masterpiece. 10/10

There's greatness in there, for sure, but 'Fireworks' (or, the better title, 'Hana-bi') drags on for too long.

I was with it for the first 45-55 minutes, but the final portion of the film really dragged for me; aside from a few moments, it kinda just repeats the same sorta scenes over and over. Like, personally, I got it... needed a bit more to it, in my opinion.

There are some very good performances, no doubt. Takeshi Kitano is the obvious star of the show, though I was also impressed by Ren Osugi - who is just as excellent as the aforementioned writer, producer and director of this 1997 flick. The support cast are solid, while everything onscreen looks neat too.

I did like this overall, but I can't say it hit me as much as it evidently has for others. Worth a watch, either way.