This film uses a kind of narrative sleight of hand. The audience is shown, in detail, the relationship between the police and one particular yakuza group, while the ties to the rival faction are left mostly in the shadows. If this were a detective novel, we would stop and ask: why is only one side described? But in the film, the insertion of the "friendly" yakuza bonded with the police makes us stop questioning. Then, after the climax, in the final scenes, we realize: we've been tricked.
In the history of yakuza cinema, the lineage is clear. First came Kurosawa's Drunken Angel (1948), where the police are powerless and the yakuza maintain the order of the streets in postwar chaos. Then came Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973), which showed how the once-impoverished police gradually grew in strength, until they stood toe-to-toe with the gangs, sliding into complicity and corruption. Viewers who know this trajectory are set up perfectly to fall into the trap here. Cops vs. Thugs depicts the very end of that era.
(Spoiler alert)
The true mastermind behind the story is likely a yakuza group deeply tied to big construction firms. Unlike the small-time street thugs of old, these new organizations have swollen into economic powers, acting on a scale unimaginable in earlier yakuza history. The protagonists - both cops and gangsters - cannot see this shift clearly, and are swallowed by it. For years, they had managed a balance of collusion, compromise, and uneasy coexistence, but now everything slips through their fingers. Their bewilderment and frustration are written all over their faces. And in the end, the audience, too, is gutted along with them.
This is not just another gangster film; it is Fukasaku Kinji's summation of the yakuza genre - a work that cuts to the very fault lines of Japanese society.
