Shinjuku Incident

Tense + Dark + Bloody + Vividly portraits gang lives in Japan + Best drama-acting of Jackie Chan so far
- It's fast-paced, tense, dark and bloody.

- To some degree, it faithfully and vividly portraits the gang lives of some Chinese illegal immigrants in Japan. For example, it shows them making money buy selling fake phone cards, stealing from gambling machine, cleaning sewers, sorting garbage in recyclable and non-recyclable stuff, etc.

- The ending is predictable.
- It gives enough time to develop some good character development.
- This is not a typical movie by Jackie Chan. There's no joke. It's not a comedy-action movie.

- It's the BEST drama-acting of Jackie Chan so far. All his previous attempts at this are bad jokes. It's Definitely Worth Watching..

Compelling and unexpected
I became a Jackie Chan fan almost 30 years ago (while living in Japan). I've collected probably over seventy of his movies.

This is an interesting, unexpected and out-of-character film for him. No humor. No martial arts. No outtakes. Graphic violence, and (some) gore. The main character is an average guy, a Chinese illegal immigrant to Japan, driven by desperation to a life of crime.

It is stated that three years were spent researching the history of illegal immigration to some parts of Japan; and the involvement of the Yakuza (Japanese organized crime). It is a fascinating expose of the way dishonesty, cruelty, immorality and violence may develop in any group of people trying to survive in an alien environment; crime as self-defense and self-preservation.

Most interesting to me, was Jackie Chan's narrative during the "Special Features." He is, as I have always thought, a good man with an optimistic (even simplistic) world view; and he spoke from a...

I would like a hand with my chestnuts.
There is certainly an auteuristic streak in the small amount of cinema I have seen from Derek Yee. His previous film Protégé (2007) dealt with the drug trade in a didactic manner which is similar to the approach this film takes in dealing with illegal immigrants in Japan. Both this and Protégé have a curious and sometimes overacting performance from Daniel Wu (Rob-B-Hood). They also both involve severing an arm. But it is his didactic approach that annoys me a bit in this film. I could not quite verbalize it until watching the extras in which Jackie Chan states that the message of the film was that of "be happy where you are" which is, of course, simplistic and ultimately deadly if you are living in a repressive regime. However, I could forgive a bit of lesson-oriented cinema (I did in Protégé), but there were other issues on the forefront that lessoned my enjoyment of the film.

The biggest issue I think some people will have...

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