V-Cinema Essentials 5: Burning Dog

What’s this, more V-Cinema Essentials? Yes, indeed. This time Burning Dog, directed by Yoichi Sai in 1991. 

Having survived the bloody results of a double-cross, Shu (Seiji Matano), finds himself in Okinawa waiting to see if he can get at the loot sent abroad to be laundered. Stumbling on an old friend, Takuji (Takashi Naito), Shu gets dragged into a yet another heist, this time at a US military base. 

There’s something quite raw, almost 1970's about Burning Dog. It’s less shiny than some of the other films in the set, where there’s often, especially in the earlier ones, an influence of late 1980's/1990's Hollywood action movies. Burning Dog has more rough edges to it, more of a nervy serrated feel. This isn’t a story where any sense of good or bad is going to exist, instead everyone exists within a moral greyness. Even the captain of the American military base is corrupt, incompetent and taking kickbacks to assign contracts to local firms. Takuji, may be legit, running a company, but seeing his friend Shu again he starts to champ at the bit to go after a new heist. 

Shu wants none of it, but the need for a passport convinces him and it’s no spoiler to say you know it’s not going to end well, because this is the kind of film where nothing ever goes as planned and nobody will be quite what you expect them to be. Each character is wearing a facade and chasing their own goals. Even another friend of Takuji’s, whom he employs, chases Takuji’s wife. It’s all murky.  

But could there be some happiness, too? Shu finds his old girlfriend also living in Okinawa running an antiques business and selling goods to the Americans stationed there (you suspect at inflated prices). But even she, as we see in flashbacks, has been around Shu and Takuji during heists gone wrong.  

Do you see a pattern emerging, hmmm? 

You also see characters change. Takuji seems at first to be every bit the legit businessman he projects, but he becomes far more demonstrative over time, more of a coiled spring, relishing the planning of the heist. Equally, his younger friend gets more and more brazen with Tokiuji’s wife... it’s as if the lure of crime draws out the various protagonists essential natures, and Shu, clearer-eyed than most sees some of it, and tries to avoid the pit looming before them all. 

The heist when it arrives is effectively done; it feels convincing, as is the lead up to it with all the planning. But it’s apparent success papers over the cracks of the nihilism within our characters as the effects of the final robbery at the military base start to play out. 

There’s a huge amount to admire in Burning Dog, even if it's a film that could have been made 15 years earlier, but that is perhaps one of its strengths. It doesn’t feel dated, rather it shares a sensibility with the yakuza films of the time when Kinji Fukasaku and others were making the genre feel more real, the violence that more crazed and often more brutal, but brutal in a way that violence is, not to make it seem playful but raw and awful. 

As the film ends it does so in the only way it ever can and you feel again that V-Cinema, certainly in terms of the Essentials boxset, takes us further than I expected. Even presented for home viewing with a 4:3 ratio, it still feels cinematic, raw and rough. The story does stutter a bit at times but the various heists , whether in flashback or contemporaneous, are directed with a deft hand.  

Burning Dog may not be a classic but it’s a raw, effective, nihilistic slice of crime thriller with a cast you should probably be glad are not your mates – or else you'd be constantly watching for knives in your back.