The Wicked Reporter – The One That Got Away

Older but not noticeably wiser, Matsuzaki continues living life on the edge while occasionally – at school sports days, for instance – trying to cut it as a semi-detached husband and father. As usual, it’s his friends who get him into trouble. One of them is a likeable and unusually level-headed hitman (played by Yamato Takeshi), who learns the hard way that good parenting is not very compatible with killing men who may be fathers themselves. Another is a chronic lush and gambling addict (played by Kara Juro, who appeared with his legendary theatre-group in Skinless Night and, many years earlier, in Oshima’s Diary of a Shinjuku Thief); a lazy novelist, he is less likely to sit down to work at his desk than to get drunk and take his clothes off in bars. The film’s conspicuously minimal plot turns on an all-or-nothing climactic bet at a racetrack.Wicked Reporter 3 – The One That Got Away is just as fast-paced and raucous as the first two films in the series, and it amply fulfils its quotas of sex, violence and gambling scenes. But the word that best characterises it might be ‘philosophical’. It’s a thoughtful film about low-lives. Or maybe a low-life film about thinking. Okuda Eiji contributes not only another indelible central performance but also some rather fine main-title calligraphy. (Tony Rayns)