The Film
Browsing the shelves of Our Price in the 90s, I remember seeing anime for the first time. One of the few things I miss about VHS is the larger cases that allowed for some very cool artwork, and the Manga line of releases were like nothing I’d seen before. Over the years, I ended up seeing things like Streetfighter II: The Animated Movie, Akira and Ghost in the Shell, but one that has evaded me even up to this point is Golgo 13. Having no context for these films, I had no idea that the anime version I saw on those shelves of VHS tapes was pre-dated by a live action adaptation of the manga.
The manga series the film is based on began in 1968, and still runs to this day, even after the death in 2021 of its creator Takao Saito. Ken Takakura plays Duke Togo, an assassin for hire also known as Golgo 13. This was apparently a stipulation of Saito’s, as he based the look of the character on Takakura. The film is based on a story from the manga called “Don’t stand behind me”. The plot takes Duke to Iran in pursuit of a sex trafficker named Max Boa (Ahmad Ghadakchian). Both plot and dialogue are minimalist at best, with much of the film unfolding as a series of set pieces as Duke gets closer and closer to tracking down Boa, travelling from Tehran out into the desert and to small cities in Iran, pursued by other members of Boa’s crew.
The film falls distinctly into two halves. The first 45 minutes take place almost entirely in Tehran (where, of course, everyone speaks Japanese fluently). This section of the film plods along, with Duke trying to get his first leads on where Boa might be. Tehran provides some striking locations, and director Junya Sato makes effectively noirish use of shadows from time to time, but it feels as if the film is stretching its running time, and that this whole section could be boiled down into one or two scenes.
Things take off for the last hour of the film. Finally with a firm lead, Duke takes off through the desert to where he suspects Boa is hiding, and it becomes little more than a chain of action scenes. A car chase through the desert, leading to a gunfight among the ruins of what appears to have been either a village or part of a small town looks like little else I’ve seen in an action movie. Sato exploits both the beauty and the unique structure of the ruins to find interesting angles and beautiful imagery, as well as capturing a tense action sequence. Even better is a sequence in which Catherine (Pouri Baneai), the woman playing Duke’s wife during the mission, arrives having been captured, and Golgo has to shoot out several recently planted mines so the car she’s in doesn’t run through them.
All the action scenes in the back half of the film are well captured, and use Iran’s stunning landscapes and architecture to great advantage. However, after the first couple, Sato struggles to find much variation in them.
Overall, despite some entertaining moments and objectively cool imagery, Golgo 13 doesn’t really engage. As Duke, Ken Takakura oozes cool, but there’s just nothing behind it. There’s no sense of Duke as a man, nor the separation between that persona and Golgo. Boa, too, lacks dimension. When he finally arrives he’s an uncomplicated bad guy that we can boo at, but there’s nothing especially interesting about him, and the rivalry between him and Duke is entirely circumstantial, which means the stakes always feel low. This goes double for the perfunctory relationship arc between Duke and Catherine.
On the whole, Golgo 13 is less fun than I’d hoped it would be. It catches light for a few action sequences, and is strikingly shot throughout, with Junya Sato pulling maximum value from his setting, but in between those moments it’s lacking character and has a dull, plodding, plot which is quite a chore to wade through to get to the film’s best moments.
★★
Disc and Extras
Eureka do their usual sterling work on the restoration and encoding of the image. Detail is strong and the contrast between the deep blacks of the shadowy night sequences in Tehran and the scorching, sun-blasted, desert yellows of the last hour is excellent.
Extras are slightly limited, but a 16 minute video piece titled Lucky 13 has Junya Sato’s biographers (who were also on Eureka’s Bullet Train disc) offering context on the director and on Golgo 13 in particular. This context is built on by Mike Leeder and Arne Venema’s commentary, which is packed with information, engaging with the cast and crew, the background of the manga, as well as the political background of Iran at the time the film was made.
