Kaiji The Ultimate Gambler   Starring: Kenichi Matsuyama and Tatsuya Fujiwara 4Digital Media RRP: £15.99 ASIA3816 Certificate: 15 Available 26 July 2010

Kaiji, finding himself down on his luck and owing a sizable sum, takes an offer to join others in a gamble of a lifetime. The prize is potentially millions, but to lose means being condemned to work in a mine, and the only way out of that is another gamble, one that may cost him his life...

Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (2009 - 2 hrs, 14 min, 49 sec) is a film based on a manga by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, which was also turned into a successful anime show. The film was directed by Tôya Satô from a Mika Ohmori screenplay.

When we first meet thirty year old Kaiji (Tatsuya Fujiwara) he is at his lowest point, poor, out of work, trying to earn his fortune with scratch cards. On meeting Endo (Yuki Amami) he is conned into joining the ship, to gamble for his future, a gamble he loses. Condemned to the mines to create an underground refuge for the rich, the workers are beaten and exploited. When Kaiji discovers that there is a way out he takes it, but it is a path which kills many of his companions.

You would think that a film about gambling would be rather dull, but this is not the case, the film has much in common with The Cube in that the participants are making choices which could end in death. There are three main gambling episodes, the first on the boat, where Kaiji is initially conned by one of the other contestants only to place his trust in another before being conned again.

The second gamble is whether the escaping group can make it across an electrified bridge between two buildings before they either fall off or are killed by touching the rail. The third and final gamble is another con, just like the first two, when Kaiji finally faces off against his nemesis in a card game. Each instance is nail bitingly paced, with the director able to inject some real peril into the sequences.

Although the film only uses a little of the source material it does attempt to inject an element of social comment, although this can get a bit muddied, with Kaiji taunting his wealthy opponent that it is in fact the rich that are poor as they fail to experience real life. Personally I always thought that was the best bit about being rich. The film does better in its examination of how the rich exploit the poor with little or no consequence for their own lives.

The film is well shot and well acted, as it should be, reuniting as it does much of the cast of Death Note films.

The DVD that was supplied was a PR screener, so hopefully the finished disc will be better than the letterbox version I saw. The disc contained no extras, though the PR blurb reliably informs me that there should be a Making Of documentary as well as the original trailer. The film is in Japanese with burnt in English subtitles.

8

Charles Packer