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As “Branded to Kill” opens, the Japanese underworld’s third-ranked contract killer, Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), arrives in Tokyo to do a job, greeted by a taxi driver, Kasuga (Hiroshi Minami), who was once a high-ranking hitman but now a shell of himself, bemoaning his old dream of being #1. This is truly hilarious dialogue equating Yakuza assassins with NFL or NBA power rankings, constantly being revised by some keyboard drone after the latest killing. Indeed, there is not much to the character of Hanada beyond his occupation. Through that light, the title assumes an almost deadpan air, as if hitmen are just livestock electrically branded by their employers. All that defines him are the jobs he does and his preeminent sexual fetish of sniffing rice. His own wife, Mami (Mariko Ogawa), who cavorts with the man who has hired Hanada out in the open, deems the two of them beasts, demonstrated in how their relationship is nothing more, really, than an endless series of primal urges, two figurative pigs raised to slaughter.
In its jump cuts and playful attitude toward gangster tropes, “Branded to Kill” suggests a Yakuza movie by way of the French New Wave, and it was one of the latter movement’s most famous figures, Jean-Luc Godard, who noted that all you needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. As if honoring and elaborating on that sentiment, Suzuki includes a gun and two girls. In addition, to his wife, Hanada becomes smitten with the mysterious, mesmerizing Misako (Annu Mari). She enlists him to perform a superhuman job, one requiring a single shot so precise it is nigh impossible, and when it goes wrong, he is marked for death, told in no uncertain terms that the #1 ranked hitman will now have to take his life. Misako is introduced standing in the rain, and frequently posed in frames between fountains, and so if water emblemizes the unconscious, so does Misako emblemize Hanada’s. Her obsession with death, suggesting a noir version of the suicidal woman in the art gallery in “Play It Again, Sam,” echoes Hanada’s own. During one hallucinatory sequence where he gets drunk and wanders the streets, the hitman seems to be taking the end of life out for virtual spin.
Yet, if that makes “Branded to Kill” sound like some arduous dark night of the soul, I cannot stress enough how despite such subject matter, it is also an absolute blast to watch on account of Suzuki’s almost euphoric formalist kick. In an interview with The Criterion Channel in 2011, Suzuki indicated his motivations did not really extend much beyond making the most entertaining movie possible and in one mid-movie sequence where Hanada knocks off three men right in a row, he brings that manifesto to life by dreaming up increasingly unorthodox hits. This rapid-fire sequence begins with a rifle emerging from the moving lips of a cigarette billboard and concludes on a getaway via advertising balloon. The last shot is a gas and is extra fascinating to compare against one earlier in the movie when another assassin runs out of a building on fire, demonstrating how Suzuki mixes blood curdling chills with boisterous comedy just as much as he mixes intense close-ups with thoughtful long shots and coats so much of it in a dissonant jazz score, the whole mélange epitomizing the absurdity of life itself. That absurdity is never more paramount than in the droll, winding denouement that finds the #1 ranked hitman animating his observation that killers cannot be human by endlessly tormenting Hanada before they finally come to face to face in a boxing ring in something akin to an existential sports movie ending on a note of irony so grim that it might as well be the most mirthless chuckle you’ve ever heard.
