Golgo 13

If you can get past the fact the first 30 minutes is just a soft core porn film. What awaits you is one of the best James Bond films I've ever seen.
The action is a lot more bloody than what you'd expect from a Bond film. But the plot, characters and everything else would feel right at home especially in the more action focused modern era of Bond films.

The entire movie looks beatiful, even the CGI bits look good and the intro was amazingly well done. Everything just looks fantastic, every character oozes personality in a way that modern computer aided animation just ... no longer does. It also got a great soundtrack full of 80s era synths and blaring instruments that set the tone perfectly for every scene. Even the mandatory sex scenes are at least well scored if tedious to watch.

I do have to dock points for how long it takes to get going, and the sheer amount of nudity is a little off putting at times. But its a solid film overall.

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.