K-20: The Fiend with Twenty Faces Film Review

Aka - K-20: Legend of the Black Mask

Over this week I have watched a number of films that Takeshi Kaneshiro acted in that were produced or co-produced in Japan. Because of his ability to speak Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkien, he has managed to be a star in numerous film industries. He is also a pop singer of course. He was born in Taiwan to a Japanese father and Taiwanese mother. At one point he went to an English-Language school, so add English to his repertoire as well. In 1992 he went off to Hong Kong and became successful as a singer before he turned to film with his debut in a classic film - Executioners alongside Maggie, Michelle and Anita. Not a bad place to start but then in his third film he rubbed the feet of Brigitte Lin in Chungking Express and the following year he appeared in another Wong Kar-wai film Fallen Angels with Karen Mok, Michelle Reiss and Charlie Yeung. An amazing start for an actor who many have questioned his acting skills. But he was a star and that was much more important. His career in Hong Kong and China has been enormously successful and I have seen many of those films - but I had not seen him in his Japanese films. In 1998 he ventured into Japan with the co-production Sleepless Town followed by Space Travelers, Returner, Sweet Rain and this one in 2008. But nothing since then.

This film is pure comic book pulp - a fun superhero film of adventure, derring-do, secret identities and romance with a strong dose of cloying social sentimental hogwash about poor children. It is a big budget film with a lot of effective CGI but the strength of the film is more down to earth - some terrific Parkour as the hero and villain battle one another all over and above the city. The stuntmen deserve kudos. I am always impressed by Parkour and the people who risk their bodies doing it. I wonder what the average Parkour life span is before enough injuries force them into retirement. This has a lot of it.

It is set in an imaginary Japan in 1949 in which WW2 was avoided and the fascistic Imperial government still rules with nobility in power and a huge divide between the rich and the many poor. There is a thief in the story - K-20 - who is sort of a combination of Lupin and Fantomas. He is brilliant, able to change his appearance at will, cruel, imaginative, acrobatic and able to cleverly escape the authorities leaving them looking helpless and foolish. He is not played by Takeshi Kaneshiro though. His identity is unknown. Takeshi is instead a performer in the circus, a magician and acrobat whose act consists of somersaulting over a series of knives that are shot at him by a machine. He is the good guy here. He wants to raise enough money for the circus announcer to get an operation and so when a gossip magazine offers him money to take photos of the wedding of police inspector Baron Akechi (Tôru Nakamura) to the heir of a huge corporation, Princess Yoko (Takako Matsu), he accepts. It is the event of the season.

But it is a set-up by K-20 - when he clicks on the camera explosions all over occur and he crashes through the window. He is arrested, beaten and put in jail - but his circus inventor friend Genji (Jun Kunimura) and his thief community enable his escape. They want him to join the thief community but he refuses - instead Genji gives him the thief manual to learn how to be a thief - not to steal but to battle K-20 and establish his innocence, It gets very cool as lesson one is to draw a straight line on a map across the city and follow it no matter what is in the way - you overcome it or just go over it - with Parkour! The film gets a bit corny when he rescues the Princess from K-20 who wants to know where Tesla's invention is. Ya, that Tesla. He invented a machine that could produce energy without wires. It could also destroy any place on the earth by hitting it with an electric jolt. She turns out to be ok - knowing judo and flying and having fun doing it. She also is shocked by the poor children and becomes a social activist. The two of them and Genji decide to work together to get K-20. A few fine set-pieces lay ahead.