THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE PHASE ONE: GOLGO 13: ASSIGNMENT KOWLOON (1977)

Before I begin, let me state that I watched a horrendous print.  It was washed out (which made the primitive subtitles almost unreadable) and full of the kind of scratches that the acolytes of the Neo Grindhouse Movement cream over.  As such, my understanding of this film might be a little limited.

What I certainly understand is the appeal of Sonny Chiba, who plays the titular character.  He’s actually not in it all that much--the real star is Wayne Newton look-a-like Callan Leung as police inspector Smithy--but he draws the eye every time he is on screen.  Watching him this time around, I could see many of the qualities I respond to in Jason Statham; Chiba has the same sort of steely cool that the Stath has, and the best moments are the ones which allow him to just be an emotionally closed off bad ass.

The film itself....well, isn’t very good.  It’s very derivative of the kind of cop thriller of the 70‘s, as it all revolves around Smithy’s quest to shut down the Hong Kong arm of an international drug syndicate and his maverick ways.  Hell, there’s a good twenty-some-odd minute chunk where Chiba is nowhere to be seen as Smithy’s partner Lin Li trails what seems to be the main villain Chan, fights some thugs, gets captured and gets killed as part of a shootout.  The death, of course, spurs Smithy on in his mission and is complicated when he learns Golgo 13 has been hired to kill Chan by the Miami-based syndicate lest he spills the beans on the whole operation.

It isn’t a big surprise that Chan is only a pawn of a much larger mastermind, and that he’s going to flee the country before Smithy can catch him.  It also isn’t a big surprise that Golgo is assigned to kill this mastermind, especially given that the film has him encounter the mastermind’s young daughter.  I had a whole sense of ‘seen this before’ of pretty much everything.  Even the climax, taking place on a island and involving Chiba hanging off a cliff, seems a tad familiar.  There’s not much other than Chiba’s charisma to latch onto, and since he has so little screen time we’re stuck with some boring Cop-On-The-Edge cliches.

I think this guy looks like Richard Belzer.....

I’d like to be a little more positive, but there’s nothing really to go on.  Reluctantly, I cannot recommend this flick.

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