#kinjite:forbidden subjects

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Movie Review | Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects (Thompson, 1989)

This review contains spoilers.

Maybe I was lulled by the relative humanism of The Evil That Men Do, but I watch my share of sleazy, morally bankrupt garbage, and it's been a while since I've watched something as upsetting as Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects. The plot here, about Charles Bronson trying to take down a pimp who peddles child prostitutes, might raise a lot of red flags, although one can concede that a Bronson vehicle can be extremely sleazy and still work on a lizard brain level (see: Death Wish II, which combines all the ugliest elements of the vigilante thriller into one neat little package). And the fact that the pimp and his sidekick are played by Juan Fernandez and Sy Richardson, the former who played a memorable character in Oliver Stone's sweaty, drug-fueled Salvador and the latter of which is a regular figure in Alex Cox's stock company, might offer some promise in terms of delicious bad guys deserving of whatever gruesome comeuppance Bronson will serve them.

But the movie doesn't settle for just that. There's also a hideously racist subplot about a Japanese businessman who sees a woman being groped on a train in Tokyo, and with his disturbing desires inflamed, decides to try that out after coming to American on Bronson's daughter, which are depicted in two agonizingly drawn out scenes. This businessman's daughter is kidnapped by the pimp, and while her arc ends one a thoroughly dispiriting note of suicide, the narrative thread around his attempted molestation of Bronson's daughter is inexplicably dropped. Why? The movie was content to get in its racist jabs and leave it at that? I've spent the last few weeks watching movies that offered not entirely positive portrayals of other cultures, but in those cases, the movies would offer certain nuances or grace notes to complicate or alleviate the portrayals. But this movie has no real interest in the Japanese, just fear and disgust, eager to depict them as evil perverts who are trying to take over. (There's a vicious racist rant by Bronson that the movie basically agrees with. Also, this might be the only American movie of this era to acknowledge what hentai is.) But then it shows that America has its share of evil perverts, which it demonstrates most forcefully in the scene where the Japanese businessman's daughter is raped in sequence by the pimp and her associates while Seinfeld-style bass blares on the soundtrack. The least racist read of this movie is that there are in fact evil perverts to go around. One imagines a sequel to this movie would have Bronson hopping from country to country killing evil perverts in airport bathrooms during each layover.

Of course, as this is a Bronson vehicle, he must go outside the law to get the bad guys off the streets, which we see him do first by jamming a dildo up a john's ass and later shoving an expensive watch down the pimp's throat. One wonders if Bronson might be better at sending bad guys to prison if he didn't force foreign objects into their orifices so readily, but these are the kind of sleazy thrills you go to see a Bronson vehicle for, especially in this era. And there are odd moments that are enjoyable on that level (I had a bit of fun with a scene where Bronson breaks up a porn shoot where the crew seems to be snorting up the budget), but this is also a movie where Bronson is replaced by an obvious body double anytime he needs to be spry and the movie mysteriously renders Richardson unable to kick down a door when it needs to tie up a plot thread. It is not a tightly directed thriller, is what I'm saying, which is disappointing as this was the final film directed by J. Lee Thompson and a very theatrical late role by Bronson. Thompson has directed some great movies like The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear, as well as one pretty good Bronson vehicle in The Evil That Men Do. But the overwhelming feeling here is one of exhaustion, with Bronson complaining every other scene about how he doesn't want to do this anymore, and the presence of both men pared down to their most base, ugly instincts, their ids unleashed on screen.

So if you wanna wallow in the filth, this might be worth a look, but you'll need an hour-long shower after. If there's one thing it's good at, it's making your skin crawl.