Review of Violent Cop

Introduction

The last film I saw which starred Takeshi Kitano was Brother, which I rather enjoyed, so I was looking forward to seeing Violent Cop, in which he stars as the rogue policeman Azuma, who in true Dirty Harry style prefers a "hands-on" method of policing, which gets results. When Azuma tries to save a corrupt colleague things go wrong, and his sister is kidnapped. Azuma then dishes out his own brand of justice.

Video

My previous experiences with MIA discs left a bad taste in the mouth and I had hoped that Violent Cop would be a step in the right direction. Whilst the video quality is an improvement on the Chuck Norris movies I`ve seen from the studio, it is still a long way short of the standard we`ve come to expect, even taking into account the age and source of the material.

The first problem is evident from the word go - the non-anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1 picture is too bright - blacks are now dark grey and the image is grainy with noticeable dirt at times. At first, these seemed like the only problems, and I could have lived with them, but when Azuma first goes to his desk in the police station, poor compression leaves a "motion blur" around the edges of his jacket which is exceptionally irritating. This problem recurs on several occasions throughout the movie and affects all manner of objects.

I`ll deal with the subtitles in the sound section…

Audio

The video wasn`t great and the sound is nothing to write home about either. The stereo soundtrack is presented in Japanese and comes with English subtitles.

The subtitles make this disc unwatchable for two reasons. The first is a minor annoyance - they are positioned in such a way that when the image is zoomed to fill a 16:9 widescreen television, the bottom of the letters is slightly obscured. I ended up watching in 14:9 with a border around the screen to read the subtitles. This problem however pales into insignificance compared to the next one: the subtitles are dreadful! Whole scenes where people speak are not subtitled so you`ve got no idea what is going on unless you speak Japanese (which I don`t). In general three long sentences spoken on-screen will attract one short subtitle, and this leads to the subtitles not making much sense with large parts of the dialogue missing. Abysmal. Violent Cop might be critically acclaimed, but how can I acclaim a movie when I don`t know what the characters are saying to each other?

Features

Extras consist of trailers, biographies, filmographies and production stills - pretty run-of-the-mill stuff.

There really isn`t much more I can add, other than that the menus are well animated and easy to navigate.

Conclusion

Once again MIA disappoint with a DVD. In this case I could have lived with the failings of the video had the subtitles allowed me to get involved with the plot. However the abysmal subtitling made the film virtually unwatchable and extremely difficult to follow.

I`m not going to make any critical appraisal of the film - it is a highly regarded film from one of Japan`s most highly regarded directors/stars. Without the benefit of proper subtitles, it is impossible to watch a foreign language film properly, let alone make any judgements, so I`m on the lookout for another version of the movie that has been done properly. I`ve therefore awarded Violent Cop an average rating of 2 for content, entirely due to the subtitles.

MIA really need to get their quality control sorted out - I`ve not seen a good disc from them yet. It really isn`t that difficult to do subtitles, it just takes a little bit of effort. Until they are sorted out, this disc should be avoided.