Boiling Point

Masaki spends his days working at a gas station and playing on an amateur baseball team that rarely wins. When he strikes a yakuza who has been hassling him, the gang turns its attention to the station and to his coach. Frightened by what he has set off, Masaki travels with a teammate to Okinawa to buy a gun, and there he meets Uehara, a violent gangster with heavy debts to the yakuza and his own plans for settling scores.

Takeshi Kitano directed and wrote the film, his second behind the camera, following Violent Cop in 1989 and preceding A Scene at the Sea in 1991. Yurei Yanagi plays Masaki, Yuriko Ishida appears as Sayaka, and Kitano himself takes the role of Uehara, alongside Guadalcanal Taka, Dankan and Makoto Ashikawa among a credited cast of twenty-eight. Hisao Nabeshima produced the film for Bandai Visual and Shochiku-Fuji Company.

The film runs ninety-six minutes and mixes crime, action and comedy within a drama about small-time lives colliding with organized crime. It holds a 7/10 critics' rating from sixteen reviews, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9/10 from 225 votes, a sign that professional and general viewers have responded to it in broadly similar terms.