The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973)

BWH&H 1: The Beginning

I can't believe there are no review of this here yet.

I'm a huge Yakuza/Like A Dragon video game fan, and have been for many, many years. That's essentially how I stumbled across this series of movies, as many consider it to be a sort of blueprint for those stories. I wasn't disappointed.

I'm not going to run through all of my loves and gripes from this entry. Instead, I'm going to give tips on how to watch these. The first thing you need to know is that these are best viewed back to back, at least within a short period of time. If you don't, you'll lose track of who is who, who is sworn to who and which gang, what their backstories and relationships are, etc. This is how I watched these five films the first time around, and I did the exact same thing recently for my second viewing of them. If you like this film, the others are pretty similar, and flow really well together.

As for this particular first film, it's an amazing start. It only scratches the surface of the yakuza world the series builds, but it's a serviceable starting point with a lot going on, and possesses a great cast of characters to follow. It moves a t a really fast pace and utilizes shaky cam, complete with all the poor choreographing you'd expect from a Japanese film from this period. If you can get by all that, you'll love it. If you can't, you're gonna hate it. It's broken up with historical narrative bits too, so you have to pay careful attention all throughout. It's a very involving plot, but ultimately it proves very rewarding in the end.

I'm giving it a 9 because it was just as entertaining on my re-watch as it was the first time around. If you like mafia-esque stories then you owe it to yourself to at least give this one a try.

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