Violent Cop

Takeshi Kitano plays Detective Azuma, a policeman whose methods are as brutal as the criminals he pursues. While looking into a series of deaths connected to the drug trade, Azuma finds that a colleague, Iwaki, has been dealing narcotics from inside the force. The discovery puts Azuma on a collision course with his superiors and with a yakuza gang, and he increasingly ignores the rules of ethical conduct that are meant to govern his work. Maiko Kawakami appears as his sister Akari, with Makoto Ashikawa, Shirō Sano, Sei Hiraizumi and Mikiko Otonashi among the credited cast of fifty-four.

The film was released in Japan in 1989 and runs 103 minutes. It was intended as a starring vehicle for Kitano, but when the original director withdrew he took over the direction himself, rewriting the script with Hisashi Nozawa; his reworking puts the focus on the solitary, contrary protagonist he plays. Violent Cop is the first of the sixteen films Kitano has directed in chronological order, followed by Boiling Point in 1990.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.1 from around 14,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.2 from roughly 422 votes, while a critics' rating stands at 7.8 from six reviews, noticeably higher than the audience scores on either site. Its small vote counts on TMDB, next to the larger number on IMDb, reflect a long international life for a Japanese crime film from the late 1980s.