‘Hell Dogs’ (2022): Decent Action Drowned in Mountains of Exposition

Directed by: Masato Harada || Produced by: Hiroyasu Nagata

Screenplay by: Masato Harada || Starring: Jun’ichi Okada, Kentaro Sakaguchi, Mayu Matsuoka, Miyavi, Kazuki Kitamura, Shinobu Otake, Satoshi Kanada, Mai Kiryu, Kyoko, Arisa Nakajima

Music by: Reiko Tsuchiya || Cinematography: Takahide Shibanushi || Edited by: Yuki Izumi, Soichi Satake || Country: Japan || Language: Japanese

Running Time: 138 minutes

As stated in previous essays on this blog, I’m not a fan of anime (the popular classics like Studio Ghibli productions or Akira [1988] are the exception rather than the rule), so the vast majority of modern popular Japanese cinema operates outside my purview given how the vast majority of the highest grossing Japanese features of all time are animated, not live-action (circa July 2023). I’m also not a huge fan of artsy, boring Japanese dramas that Western critics often fawn over like Drive My Car (2021), so much of my attention in modern East Asian cinema is commanded by Indonesian, Chinese Hong Kong, and Korean cinema in particular. On the other hand, Netflix provides a convenient distribution platform for international cinema like Shinsuke Sato’s Bleach (2018) and Alice in Borderland (2020, 2022) adaptations, while my interest in crime dramas always points me in the direction of a good yakuza film (e.g. Takashi Miike’s First Love [2019]).

Hell Dogs, longtime filmmaker Masato Harada‘s adaptation of the 2017 novel of the same name by author Akio Fukamachi, is one of the more recent Japanese yakuza flicks distributed on the aforementioned streaming platform. It’s also one of the more frustrating, incoherent, and disorganized action movies or crime dramas I’ve seen in some time.

Supporting actor and Japanese rockstar Miyavi gives one of the better performances in Hell Dogs, but the bloated story and its messy conclusion waste his character.

The premise of the film is enticing enough: We open with lead man Jun’ichi Okada, a former cop turned vigilante who finishes off the last of his “Death List Five (a series of criminals who murdered innocent civilians several years prior)” by the end of a frenzied, hyperactive prologue that involves no less than one fistfight, multiple split-second flashbacks in color, and an extended black-and-white flashback to bookend Okada’s introduction. Okada is then arrested by federal law enforcement, who offer to employ him as an undercover agent in a Tokyo yakuza syndicate (more productive than just imprisoning or executing him on the street, I suppose). While this opening grabs your attention and familiarizes the viewer with the lead character, it’s unfortunately an accurate preview of the nonstop, clunky exposition, caffeinated editing, and incalculable number of forgettable, pointless supporting characters with which you’ll be inundated over the next 2.25 hours (~138 minutes)

I’ve noted before how the point of an action film is to tell a story through action; an action film — unlike the default format of most blockbusters, Hollywood or otherwise, which feel akin to lazy melodramas interspersed with mass audience-friendly, FX-driven set-pieces handled primarily in post-production and often by a second unit director — is not supposed to have an abrupt, obvious start-and-stop rhythm where the narrative grinds to a halt every time the guns start blasting; on the contrary, violence is supposed to heighten storytelling efficiency in those types of movies, while crime dramas are built around the threat of such violence, the suspense that comes before a potential hitjob, for example.

Though Hell Dogs works better as a crime drama than as an action film, and its few action set-pieces, courtesy of Okada’s choreography, are entertaining for how they intermix fisticuffs with gunplay, everything outside its cinematic violence feels awkward. For one, mountains of dialogue engorge almost every scene, from the feds explaining to Okada (re: the audience) his target crime syndicate to various drug buys by different yakuza gangs to the reports Okada gives to his police handlers at a masseuse lodge. You’ll struggle to remember who’s who, who’s doing what to whom, and why exactly we should care given numerous characters’ impersonal, nihilistic attitudes about pretty much everything.

The film’s pace does spike a bit around the end of the second act, to writer-director Harada’s credit, where an attempted assassination of the main yakuza boss (singer-songwriter Takamasa Ishihara, known professionally as Miyavi) at a party leads into a multipart shootout in a construction site and a subsequent retaliatory strike at a rival gang’s country club. Aside from the obvious digital blood squibs, I have no complaints with these set-pieces, though at this point franchises like John Wick (2014–2023), Extraction (2020, 2023), and the Daniel Craig-era Bond films (2006–2021) do everything this movie does just as well, if not better (never thought I’d compare Western action movies favorably to East Asian ones, now did you?).

The heart of Hell Dogs’ story is supposed to be the brotherly relationship between undercover cop and lead Okada and yakuza costar Kentarô Sakaguchi (top), as well as the romantic subplot with female lead Mayu Matsuoka (bottom); but Okada doesn’t seem to care too much about either, so as a result, neither do we.

The overall construction of Hell Dogs is the main issue, here. Aside from its bloated supporting cast and questionable editing decisions (Why conclude the film with a flashback introducing a major costar? Put that after the prologue!), the movie’s original sin is its gargantuan levels of expository dialogue. So many character relationships and so much gangster jargon are machine-gunned into the viewer every other scene that (1) the main narrative is borderline impossible to follow, and (2) the picture feels like a rough CliffsNotes summary of its literary source material as opposed to a true adaptation to film. The baffling creative decisions that led to Hell Dogs as is remind me of the jumbled messes that were The Villainess (2017) and The Witch 2 (2022), where the screenplay feels like it was written with several cool scenes in mind but little thought put into how to construct a cohesive story arc. As much as I love crime dramas in general and yakuza potboilers from Japan in particular, not even a hardcore fan of action-oriented mafia films would entertain this thing.

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SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATION: Films like Hell Dogs make my championing of contemporary live-action Japanese cinema harder given how disorganized their final results are. Even if one overlooks the nonsensical edits and overloaded dialogue, which is impossible in my assessment, you’re left with banal, cynical characters not worth rooting for.

— However… Hell Dogs has some neat fight scenes a little over halfway through its runtime that are worth a gander if you have twenty minutes.

—> NOT RECOMMENDED; there are so many better options available to you, on streaming or off, on either side of the Pacific.

? What was the point of those throwaway lines about the ivory trade and animal rights? Who gives a shit? You’ve murdered like three dozen people in this movie, alone.