Riki Takeuchi Movies

Director Hitoshi Matsumoto weaves this darkly comic mockumentary about a Japanese giant who continues the long-standing family tradition of facing off against Tokyo's most formidable monsters. Constantly caught in the middle of everyone's battles, Daisato finds his sincere efforts to keep the peace repeatedly belittled; he's divorced, his neighbors have covered his house in graffiti, and he gets nothing but dirty looks when he walks down the street. When we first meet Daisato, he is the subject of a television documentary. Though on the surface Daisato may seem like your average, slightly unkempt salaryman -- completely unremarkable in all respects -- it soon becomes apparent just how deceiving first impressions can be. After lamenting on camera the fact that he never gets any vacation time due to frequent calls from the Defense Department, the camera follows Daisato as he rides his motorbike to a Tokyo power plant, receives the jolt of electricity that transforms him into a hulking superhuman crime fighter, and clashes with a gargantuan leviathan intent on destroying Tokyo. Daisato comes from a long line of heroic heavyweights, yet while his ancestors were once championed with parades for their noble efforts, public interest in giant invaders has waned and Daisato has become something of a joke to the citizens of Tokyo. Not only is the noise generated by Daisato's battles regarded as a public nuisance, the property damage that he causes while defending the city has the citizens downright angry. Now, as Daisato attempts to balance his responsibilities to his ex-wife, his daughter, his agent, and his senile grandfather, the crushing weight of both his personal and professional obligations simply becomes too much to bear. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

When a flamboyant but down-on-their-luck pair of Edo-period samurai blast off onto the open roads to do battle with heroin addiction and ponder the true meaning of life at the shrine of Ise, a blip in reality finds them thrust into a world where fantasy takes the place of the everyday, and the past merges with the present with disorienting hilarity. From the warped mind of Zebraman writer Kankuro Kudo comes a hallucinogenic tale of gay love in a world where nothing is as it seems. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike directed this characteristically offbeat and hard-hitting crime drama. Seiji and Yoshifumi are a pair of yakuza (Japanese gangsters) who have sworn their loyalty to mob boss Muto. When Muto fails to pay his proscribed share of the fund for an upcoming gang battle, Muto tells the other leaders of the Date family that he will fight to make up his debt. Seiji, however, becomes concerned for Muto's safety, so he has his boss arrested and offers to fight in his place. This, however, leads to speculation about Muto's role in his recent misfortune. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

DragonBall Z meets Blade Runner meets a William S. Burroughs head trip in this hallucinogenic sci-fi flick directed by Takashi Miike. It is set in the year 2346 in the city-state of Yokohama, which has become thoroughly sinocized in the intervening 300 years. People speak a mishmash of Japanese, Chinese, and English and the streets are bathed in digital noise. The place is run with an iron fist by an exuberantly gay potentate named Woo (Richard Cheung) who, hoping to fashion a newer, crueler society, drugs the populace with a cocktail akin to Prozac-laced birth control pills. Pregnant women and children are sent to prison. Woo's lead henchman is named Honda (Riki Takeuchi), a sneering uber-cop with a Wayne Newton-style head of hair. The underground resistance is led by the English-speaking Fon (Terence Yin), his fierce girlfriend Jyun (Josie Ho), and a yellow-haired humanoid robot named Ryo (Sho Aikawa). Raids, kung-fu fistfights, and general weirdness ensue until the cataclysmic showdown between Ryo and Honda. This film is the third and final in Miike's reported Dead or Alive trilogy. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Takashi Miike takes a dime-a-dozen yakuza script and turns it inside out in this high-octane surrealist crime action thriller. The film's first ten minutes is a breathless montage depicting a naked woman clutching a bag of cocaine being thrown off a high-rise, a porcine Chinese gangster devouring bowl after bowl of noodles before getting whacked, a tinsel-wigged stripper in mid-grind, another Chinese gangster having sex with a guy in a pubic bathroom, clowns throwing knives, and the world's longest cocaine line. Welcome to planet Miike -- one that seems unnervingly like reality but just tweaked enough that the viewer believes almost anything can (and does) happen. What follows is a tale pitting narcotics cop Jojima (Sho Aikawa), who has an ailing daughter and a neglected wife, against Ryuichi (Riki Takeuchi), a Chinese-born gangster sporting a hairstyle that would make Wayne Newton jealous. As Ryuichi tries to muscle in on a big drug haul from Taiwan, those closest to him get killed -- particularly his whey-faced younger brother and girlfriend (the latter meets a particularly grizzly end at the hands of a sadistic scat-enthusiast yakuza). Likewise, Jojima, who is on Ryuichi's tail, looses his partner, his wife, and his daughter. Soon the two are on the road to a literally cataclysmic confrontation. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Battle-weary Yakuza courier Kanuma (Riki Takeuchi) dons his snakeskin suit and wraparound sunglasses to visit Los Angeles for what he believes is his last assignment before calling it quits. He has to deliver money to a small-time drug dealer (George Cheung) and pick up a substantial shipment of cocaine. But the job is snakebit from the start as a double-cross by Vincent (Robert MacColl), a violent drug dealer, leads to the death of two women, one of them Kanuma's beautiful fiancée (Eiko Nijo) and the other his long-lost sister (Mai Hoshino). Kanuma's life takes another eventful twist when he learns that the local police have been setting him up for disaster since the beginning. Behind the cool of the sunglasses are the eyes of a now-psychotic and heavily armed Japanese Yakuza gangster who is bent on violent revenge. ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide

Toshimichi Ohkawa makes his feature debut with this straight-to-video gangster thriller. The film opens with a trio of former yakuza -- Nambu (Riki Takeuchi), Onishi (Hideo Nakano), and Taki (Masaya Katoh), who have since gone on to become executives in an advertising company -- sitting around in a bar remembering their gangster years. When the group of yakuza sitting nearby hear Nambu make a disparaging remark about them, trouble ensues. They manage to leave unscathed, but when Onishi unwisely tries to retrieve his umbrella, he is beaten up. Their mobster instincts piqued, the three vow revenge. Yet when Nambu kills one of their barroom enemies, the three find themselves with a price on their heads. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Former hitman Ginya Yabuki (Riki Takeuchi) left the mafia and split somewhat contentiously with his longtime former partner. Years later, that same ex-partner has emerged as the head of a very dangerous crime syndicate and Yabuki is forced to confront his former partner, which may start an all-out war within the Tokyo Mafia. ~ Ryan Shriver, All Movie Guide