Before going any farther wash any thoughts of Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey out of your mind. This isn’t that film. This film is the Takashi Miike police thriller just released on Media Blasters’ Tokyo Shock imprint.
Of the twenty or so Miike films I have seen thus far – a large number, but still a relatively small fraction of the prolific director’s work – Negotiatior is by far the most conventional. Setting up as a conventional police procedural the story eventually takes a turn into some unexpected territory but the film itself remains entirely devoid of the visual flourishes that Miike has largely built his reputation on. This is Miike playing it straight and producing a solid, in unspectacular, little film in the process.
When a convenience store robbery goes wrong and the thieves hole up in a Tokyo hospital, holding more than thirty people hospital, famed negotiator Shuhei Ishida is called in to handle the case. But there is a complication: Ishida’s cancer stricken wife is among the hostages and fearing that his objectivity may be compromised he is forced to call in the only other negotiator available, Maiko Tono a young woman with a bright future until rumors began to circulate that she and Ishida had been involved in an affair and she was relegated to the archive room. This sets the stage for a complicated game of cat and mouse between police and hostage takers, a game shot through with layers of unresolved tension between Ishida and Tono, until the film takes a surprising turn and you realize that nothing is as it seems.
Negotiator is largely a performance piece, a film that Miike elected to shoot as naturalistically as possible, and as such it relies entirely on the strength of its script and cast. All is well on the cast front, the film populated with a host of recognizable faces who turn in universally strong performances. The script is a little weaker, however. It aims admirably high, layering in scads of back story and personal relationships but it misfires some on the cop thriller front with a few points never adequately explained. It has an admirable level of complexity for a commercial thriller but lacks some of the bang and dazzle that people often demand from this sort of film. Visually there is nothing to distinguish the normally iconoclastic Miike from any one of a healthy number of mainstream commercial directors which will leave many die hard Miike fans disappointed.
Media Blasters has given the film a strong release. The transfer is clean and anamorphic though it shows the limits of a film that appears to have been shot on DV. You get the original Japanese audio in 5.1 and 2.0 with solid English subtitles. Also included are a twenty five minute making of video and – a major rarity for a Miike release – a subtitled commentary track.
Negotiator is not likely the point I’d want to start anyone on Miike but it does show yet another face to this multi faceted director. A solid thriller with a strong cast it lacks the staying power of many other Miike films but is certainly worthy of a look nonetheless.