Golgo 13

NOTE: Wrote this review on Letterboxd on 9/29/2021

When I heard that Takao Saitou passed away, I had to revisit this film. Golgo 13: The Professional is still a great action movie in my opinion. Duke Togo aka Golgo 13 is one of my favorite anime and manga characters ever because he is a total badass. Golgo 13 is like combining James Bond and Django Reinhardt into one awesome macho character. I have seen people criticize Duke Togo for having no personality and I disagree with that. I love that Duke Togo is silent but deadly. It makes him even more awesome with the fascinating aura ... of mystery around the character. Duke Togo is a human grim reaper when he is on screen. When you make contact with him, you know that you're already dead. He never misses his target by killing them in a single shot. You know you're already dead when you make contact with him. He never misses a target since he kills them with one shot. Golgo 13 was killing people in one strike before Saitama made it cool.

Duke Togo is overflowing with testosterone. When you watch this movie, you will grow body hair and an extra set of testicles (an extra pair for men). Duke Togo is a lady's man who can chew bubblegum and kick-ass at the same time.I miss the days when we had action heroes like these (not just anime & manga). Except for John Wick and a few others, I believe that today's action heroes lack the fun and badass nature that older action heroes possessed. Every scene in Golgo 13: The Professional is brilliantly animated, and the animation is outstanding. When animating his films, Osamu Dezaki was known for his meticulous attention to detail.

When watching Golgo 13: The Professional, you can see every tiny bit of detail on the guns, clothes, backgrounds, etc. The animation is very stylistic with the characters looking more realistic than most anime do. The character designs don't look like most typical anime and manga characters in my opinion. Golgo 13: The Professional is known to be one of the first anime films to use CGI. You have a small scene of CGI that looks laughable by today's standers. Back in 1983, it was state of the art. You get plenty of testosterone-fueled action scenes and gory violence that are satisfying to watch. The jazzy soundtrack and the sleazy atmosphere adds more icing to the cake. Duke Togo is voiced by the legendary Tetsurô Sagawa (RIP) and his voice is perfect in my opinion. Even the dub from Streamline Pictures is solid, and it is probably one of their best dubs next to their dub for Wicked City (1987) in my opinion.

Golgo 13: The Professional has a dark, and mature story that deals with the obsession with revenge. You get to see how human misery affects everyone, not just the individual person. The primary villain, Leonard Dawson, begins to push his thirst for vengeance to the point where it backfires on him. You have a fun cast of supporting characters that, in my opinion, are memorable. Snake, Gold, and Silver have always impressed me as interesting villains. Duke Togo is pushed to the ground by the battle between those guys because it demonstrates that he is not invincible. Duke Togo is a very tough man, yet he is still a human being. He can still be killed in the same way that any other human would. It allows the film to place Duke Togo in a dangerous situation, leaving the audience to wonder how he will survive.

Overall, Golgo 13: The Professional is a great movie that I highly recommend checking it out. Even those who aren't fans of anime will likely enjoy it. Rating: 9/10

Golgo 13: The Professional.

To me, its was The Eighties: The Anime.

Golgo 13, an assassin who lives by a samurai code and never breaks his word, shoots his way through a Sicilian mafia and uncovers that a mysterious organisation is trying to put him 6 feet into the ground. He's a mix of James Bond and Agent 47, which makes him even more badass.

This movie has all the action you could wish for, and more. He pulls off seemingly impossible shots with his rifle, gets into fistfights with special forces and extremely sinister villains, engages in high speed car chases where he drifts round the ... streets of San Francisco, and makes love to several women whilst saxophones perform a romantic rendition in the background.

All this whilst the art is gorgeously drawn, no shots are the same as Golgo 13 stoicly fights through the movie from beginning to end. However, there are some flaws to this movie.

There's the worst CGI scene I've ever witnessed near the end of the spectacle which ruined my immersion completely. I couldn't help but laugh at how out of place the CGI was. Did they run out of money for that scene or something?

Another flaw was that they had spent the entire movie building up the 3 counter assassins who seemed impossible to kill and has Golgo 13 dispatch of them within minutes. On one hand, it does show how invulnerable Golgo is, but on the other hand it does leave me and possibly a lot of other people underwhelmed by how easily they were killed.

All in all, this is a great movie to watch despite the flaws if you're big on action, mystery and maybe even romance and love the eighties as a decade.

*review contains minor spoilers, but it doesn't matter because the movie sucks*

This movie started off as something great. The directing, the shot composition, and the art itself all being excellent. The first 20 minutes of this movie is a solid 8 or 9, and then the integrity of the script starts to crumble almost immidiately.

I'm always put off when a stoic character like Golgo or Max Payne shacks up with someone they've just met, it always seemed to me as if they were betraying their character. So, as you could imagine, it always perplexed me whenever one of the 'once every five second' sex scenes ... popped up completely out of nowhere and ran over the pacing of the movie like a puppy being hit by a lawnmower. But I was able to ignore that, seeing as it was a personal peeve and I was able to find the rest of the scenes rather enjoyable.

Now, I would like to think I have a lot of patience for silliness and wacky scenes in media. I can get over strange things happening IF the series is based in a fictitious world that allows for fantasy elements such as a stupid snake man that chews the scenery like a baseball player would chew tobacco... However, the world that was set up for us in this movie seems to be one steeped in realism, judging by the first half hour; in which Golgo executes targets in beautifully directed scenes where bullets rip through their targets leaving them dead and gone from this world, and everyone around them in a state of shock and horror.

Judging from the last scentance I've just wrote, you can see why I'd be a little fucking surprised when a scene happens in which a man is crucified to a wall by knives and Golgo is attacked by his killers, who just so happen to be the three stooges of the cia, they all have their very own wacky gimick and near-comedic facial expression. This is then followed up by the church being absolutely obliterated by machine gun fire and collapsing, presumedly killing everyone inside... Though, five seconds later we see Golgo going for a dip and he appears to be safe and sound.

The next scene is when I flat out began to laugh at this movie. Golgo's informant is killed by a strange looking man in a way I can't even describe, blood just seems to fly from around his neck for no reason I can fathom. This strange man is then introduced as 'big snake', a big tall bastard who slithers everywhere and is super fast or whatever. This scene is followed up by the three amigos from earlier rocking up and getting bodied by this guy in a way that doesn't fit the tone of everything I've seen up to this point, and it was at that point that I turned the movie off. Big snake molesting the widow was the last straw and I just kind of gave up. I wouldn't care about a lot of this stuff if the first 20 minutes weren't so engaging.