This is the only movie I've seen where Sonny Chiba doesn't play an ass-kicking martial-artist of some sort. Instead he's the driver of a train with a bomb on it that will explode if the train goes under a certain speed. Who knew that the movie SPEED with Keeanu Reeves was a remake of a Japanese disaster film? I remember liking SPEED well enough back in the 90s but this version makes it look like a cartoon in comparison. They do that thing here where you start out hating all the villains but by the film's end your sympathies are, at least somewhat, changed. There's also a pretty big downer of an ending (because this was the 70s) giving everything an epic feeling.
The original Japanese version of this is over 2 and a half hours long. The dubbed version I watched is a little shy of 2 hours, apparently they removed some of the character's backstories which I'm not sure diminished my enjoyment. In some other countries they cut it down to around 90 minutes which seems crazy short for this story.
No comments:
Post a Comment