| Gonin | |
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DVD cover of Gonin |
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| Directed by | Takashi Ishii |
| Produced by | Katsuhide Motoki Taketo Niitsu Takuto Niizu |
| Written by | Takashi Ishii |
| Starring | Kōichi Satō 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 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Gonin (Japanese: ゴニン (５人) or, in some English-language editions, The Five) is a 1995 film directed by Takashi Ishii and starring Takeshi Kitano, Kōichi Satō, and Masahiro Motoki. This was the first film Kitano starred in after his 1994 motorcycle accident. The eye patch the character wears was because his right eye was still leaking fluids.[1]
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.
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