Gonin

109 minutesCountryJapanLanguageJapanese

Gonin (Japanese: ゴニン (５人) or, in some English-language editions, The Five) is a 1995 crime film directed by Takashi Ishii and starring Takeshi Kitano, Kōichi Satō and Masahiro Motoki. This was the first film Kitano starred in after his 1994 motorcycle accident. The eyepatch the character wears was because his right eye was still leaking fluids.^[1]

Summary

Bandai (Sato) is a disco owner whose business, following the collapse of Japan's bubble economy, is slowly disintegrating, and who owes debts he cannot possibly pay to the local yakuza. His solution is to rob the gangsters, for which purpose he assembles a team consisting of other casualties of the economic downturn—including a gay hustler (Motoki) who frequents his club, a down-on-his-luck ex-cop (Jinpachi Nezu), an unbalanced salaryman (Naoto Takenaka), and a Thai pimp (Kippei Shiina). The hastily planned heist goes off awkwardly, and the yakuza start tracking down the conspirators, hiring a team of hitmen (Kitano and Kazuya Kimura) to take out the thieves.

Cast

• Kōichi Satō as Mikihiko Bandai
• Masahiro Motoki as Junichi Mitsuya
• Jinpachi Nezu as Kaname Hizu
• Kippei Shiina as Jimmy
• Naoto Takenaka as Shohei Ogiwara
• Megumi Yokoyama as Nammy
• Eiko Nagashima as Saki
• Maiko Kawakami as Hostess at Pinky
• Hideo Murota as Shikine
• Kazuya Kimura as Kazuma Shibata
• Shingo Tsurumi as Shigeru Hisamatsu
• Toshiyuki Nagashima as Yasumasa Ogoshi
• Takeshi Kitano as Ichiro Kyoya

References

External links

• Gonin at IMDb
• Gonin at AllMovie
• (in Japanese) Gonin at the Japanese Movie Database