The Yakuza

Upon arriving back in Japan, after 20 years back in The States, Mitchum's Harry Kilmer takes a look out his friend's window at the towering skyscraper that was nothing like what he'd seen in the city as a GI back in the late 40s.

"Everywhere I look, I can't recognize a thing."
"It's still there." his friend tells him.

Harry's there to help out a friend whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Yakuza. He's getting the help of his old flame's brother, Ken, a man who hates Harry, but owes him. And he will help him out of giri, obligation, for a debt he can never repay.

Things get more complicated from there.

Mitchum is still a man not to screw with, even with salt and pepper hair and a bit of a gut. And those sad heavy lidded eyes just get sadder with age, lending creedence to the unspoken melancholy in the meeting between him and his old girlfriend. Sure it's a film noir convention, the hero meets with the woman who broke his heart all those years ago. But when all those years can be measured in decades, and both of the couple look like they've lived it, that's gut wrenching on a different level.

I don't want to say too much, and ruin it, but a whole lot of people aren't who they seem to be, and no one comes out clean. But then, them's the rules for noir, even if you're in Japan, and it's a martial arts flick too.

That's right. Robert Mitchum. In a martial-arts movie. With swords and shit. Don't worry, he's still guns a blazing.

The kitana battle at the end, fuck if it don't put an asterisk on Kill Bill.