Gonin

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Gonin
DVD cover of Gonin
Directed by	Takashi Ishii
Produced by	Katsuhide Motoki Taketo Niitsu Takuto Niizu
Written by	Takashi Ishii
Starring	Koichi Sato Masahiro Motoki Jinpachi Nezu Kippei Shiina
Music by	Goro Yasukawa
Cinematography	Yasushi Sasakibara
Editing by	Akimasa Kawashima
Release date(s)	Sept 23, 1995
Running time	109 min
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
IMDb profile

Gonin (or, in some English-language editions, The Five) is a 1995 film directed by Takashi Ishii and starring Takeshi Kitano, Koichi Sato, and Masahiro Motoki.

[edit] Summary

Bandai (Sato) is a disco owner whose business, following the collapse of Japan's "bubble economy", is slowly disintegrating, and who owes debts to local Yakuza money he cannot possibly pay. His solution is to rob the gangsters, for which purpose he assembles a team consisting of other casualties of the economic downturn—including a hustler (Motoki) who frequents his club (and who, depending on how you interpret the film's opening credits, may or may not have stabbed him in the face), a down-on-his-luck ex-cop (Jinpachi Nezu), an unbalanced salaryman (Naoto Takenaka), the extent of whose derangement is unclear until the film's most notorious and horrifying scene, and a Thai pimp (Kippei Shiina, in a strange, convincingly brain-damaged performance). The hastily-planned heist goes off awkwardly, and the Yakuza start tracking down the conspirators, hiring a team of hitmen (Kitano and Kazuya Kimura) to take out the thieves.