Crime Hunter 3: Killing Bullet enjoyed its North American Premiere at the fourth edition of Big Bad Film Fest
Shundo Okawa’s Crime Hunter saga comes to an explosive finish in Crime Hunter 3: Killing Bullet. If you’re at all familiar with the franchise by now, you pretty much get the formula for success here with the V-Cinema brand, and you have the good sense to put your brain to rest and enjoy what these films offer, and Okawa’s finale here delivers accordingly in that regard.
The film reunites lead actor Masanori Sera in the role of stoic detective Joe (a.k.a. Joker) thrust into another near-death adventure when ex-lover, Serika (Kyoko Tsujisawa), saunters into his apartment seeking safe haven from her notorious Japanese-Mexican gun/drug running crime boss, Nichol (Kentaro Shimizu), the ringleader of the two million dollar robbery of a gambling establishment. After failing to protect her, Joker kicks into cop mode once again to investigate Nichol’s whereabouts and possibly rescue Serika, following leads that trail him to a renegade drug pusher named Ricky (Riki Takeuchi), and Sunny (Mie Yoshida), a detective with eyes on avenging her partner’s death.
With the score sitting in a briefcase and its whereabouts unknown, what follows is a deadly cat and mouse game as Joker reluctantly forms a tenuous partnership with Sunny, as well as Ricky whose priorities are more to do with the money than anything. Their mission soon reaches a deadly point of no return when Serika’s rescue is botched and Sunny is kidnapped, leaving the Joker and Ricky to resolve their frictive association with each other, rescue Sunny and dispatch Nichol and his goonsquad once and for all.
Crime Hunter 3: Killing Bullet plays like something the late Albert Pyun would have made. The film is full-up with gun battles, sexy women, shade-wearing henchmen with trench coats fresh out of Simon Wincer’s Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991), and a villain with the audacity to wear white, and a set of demonic eyes to match. The film was also reportedly shot in Guam for a more Westernized appeal as well which makes more sense of the prominence of English this time around as well, so you can expect to hear the cast in some suitably thick accents while speaking the language in key scenes (for clarity, the previous installments were filmed in Okinawa).
Fans of the films will also be delighted to see a few familiar faces in this threequel, namely Keishi Hunt who appears in the second installment, and actor Seiji Matano who makes a cameo earlier on in the film. Famed co-star Takeuchi gets a bigger screen presence for the third outing in his reunion with leading man Sera, between rounds up gun battles and fisticuffs, and a third act that lays it all on the table for the duo. Both gel excellently with co-star Yoshida who carries the trilogy’s first female cop protagonist really well, while Tsujisawa’s role lends enough well-timed mystique to the layered role of Joe’s belegaured former lover-turned-damsel in distress.
There’s a lot that Crime Hunter 3: Killing Bullet offers to fans much like that of its predecessors, in its substance and story, as brisk as it is and even with a slightly longer run time. A notable bookmark in Japanese cinema history with the proliferation of V-Cinema, if you grew up in the era of titles released on VHS Trimark, Imperial, Nu Image and PM Entertainment and loved action movies as the next person, you’d be hard pressed to pass V-Cinema up, and with a director like Okawa putting out one of the hardest hard-boiled cop trilogies of the early aughts…
I really hope Arrow is cooking something up for another bundle release here after last year.