Hell Dogs

It's been quite a long time since I watched a Yakuza flick with a little extra, I'm not surprised Harada is the one to make it happen. He's the type of director who can take any genre and infuse it with a sprinkle of originality, without necessarily deviating from core genre clichés. Hell Dogs is a very typical Yakuza film (complex, littered with characters, honor codes, and backstabbing), but the presentation is just a tad slicker, the score a little more distinctive and the action has that extra dash of energy. The performances are solid too, and while the film is a tad long, it never lost my attention.