The Cinematic Double Act You Never Knew You Wanted
Who needs Deadpool & Wolverine?
One is acerbic, wisecracking, and verbose. The other is taciturn, wary and gruff. Smash them together, and you get a double act for the ages.
No, I’m not talking about Deadpool & Wolverine.
I’m talking about two 30+ year-old gangster flicks: The Long Good Friday (1980), and Sonatine (1993).
Unlike Marvel’s box office behemoth, this isn’t a team-up that audiences have been clamoring for. But if you’re after a partnership that leaves you feeling electrified rather than lobotomized, this pairing could be the cinematic solution you didn’t know you needed.
Here’s why.
Shot: The Long Good Friday
Love gangster movies? The Long Good Friday’s meat-and-potatoes genre premise will make your mouth water.
Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins, in his breakout role) is a London gang boss with lofty visions of ‘legitimising’ his operation by building a Docklands property empire, aided by an impending partnership with the American mafia.
Alas, a lifetime of murder, extortion, and racketeering has a nasty habit of leaving a few loose ends. When a series of brutal attacks from a mysterious adversary threatens to dismantle Harold’s meticulously laid plans, he and his band of desperados must threaten, bribe, shoot, and slice their way into finding and stopping their shadowy enemy before it’s too late.
It’s not a stretch to call The Long Good Friday an urtext for the run of British crime flicks popularized by Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn in the early noughties. Snatch, Lock Stock, and Layer Cake aficionados out there (I see you) will find themselves <DiCaprio-pointing-meme>ing at the acidic script (“The Yanks love snobbery. They really feel they’ve arrived in England if the upper class treats ‘em like shit”), dreary London backdrop (described by one Letterboxd reviewer as “just ghastly”), eruptions of casual violence and ‘funny-until-it’s-not’ sequence of compounding crises.
Oh, and need I add that there is a sinister mustachioed sidekick called ‘Razors’?
The Ritchie comparison only goes so far. This is far from an insipid version of a recipe that would later be perfected — rather, it’s the full-bodied, lip-smacking original dish. Gone are the winking, teenage-boy-coded sensibilities of Ritchie’s films, replaced by a sinking sense of claustrophobic dread as the noose tightens around the impulsive Harold. Bob Hoskins is inspired as the unnervingly vulnerable head honcho, imperiously sneering and snarling his way through London’s underbelly like a Cockney Robert De Niro one moment and quietly shedding a tear for the death of his best friend the next. By his side is his upper-class girlfriend, Victoria, played by a young Helen Mirren. Poised and canny, her careful attempts to keep the ship afloat clash head-on with Shand’s increasingly combustible instincts.
Several other flourishes elevate this from standard genre fare into something weightier, not least its regular stylistic flexes (keep an eye out for the exquisite long take that closes the film) and whip-smart script, which manages to land blows on Thatcherist individualism, British exceptionalism, and class tensions while still knowing when to shut up and play the genre hits.
Chaser: Sonatine
If you choose, as I did, to watch the Japanese cult-classic Sonatine the day after The Long Good Friday, you can be forgiven for spending the first 45 minutes thinking I’ve prescribed you a double dose of the same medicine.
While the details differ, the setup is the same gangster movie shtick: an aging Yakuza boss dreams of retirement but is pulled into one last job defending an ally’s operation from a series of brazen attacks.
Then, the film pauses.
The simmering tension suddenly goes off the boil as the film transforms into something altogether more jolting, contemplative, and unsettling. Temporarily escaping the violent realities of Yakuza life, our small band of gangsters lay low on a beautiful Okinawan beach. Slowly, carefully, this seemingly idyllic setting reveals itself as a sort of purgatorial holding pen. The men descend into a series of childish games, yet the violent reality of their world inevitably bleeds through, shattering the fragile carapace of childhood nostalgia.
Truth is, if you’ve been paying attention during the film’s opening sections, you will have already noticed that Sonatine isn’t what it first appears. Although we’ve been treated to the genre hits, they’ve been played strangely out of key. We’ve seen it all: surprise explosions, bar shoot-ups, daring raids on enemy territory, but there’s been no flourish, no crescendo. The violence, which is plentiful, unfolds with a bland proceduralism that isn’t just understated; it’s decidedly mundane.
Our protagonist, played by the film’s director, producer, writer, and editor (!), Takeshi Kitano, barely blinks when bullets fly past his ear. He blandly orders the death of a wretched mahjong owner like he’s ordering groceries. The roiling violence in which he is engulfed is so meaningless that it barely registers.
While The Long Good Friday’s bombast will leave your ears ringing, Sonatine communicates in fragmented whispers. If the former plays gangster cinema in a major key, the latter does so in minor, hitting all the same notes but creating a tonally opposite experience. Each alone is a tour-de-force. Partnered together, they deliver a whiplash-inducing slug to the solar plexus that lands with an impact the Merc with a Mouth could only dream of.
Both Sonatine and The Long Good Friday are under 2 hours long and available on streaming. What’s stopping you?
I wonder why they so rarely make good buddy cop films anymore 🤔