Crying Freeman

Crying Freeman follows Yo Hinomura, a Chinese artist who is abducted and conditioned into becoming the obedient assassin of a secret organisation known as the Sons of the Dragon. He carries out killings with precision, yet weeps after each one, a habit that gives him his nickname. When a painter named Emu O'Hara witnesses him execute a Japanese gangster in San Francisco, the cult's rules demand that she die as well, but the two instead fall for each other, setting up a conflict between his masters and the yakuza clan bent on revenge for a slain leader.

The film is based on the manga by Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami. Christophe Gans directed it, his second feature after Necronomicon in 1993, working from a screenplay he wrote with Roger Avary and Thierry Cazals. Mark Dacascos plays Yo opposite Julie Condra as Emu, with Rae Dawn Chong, Byron Mann, Masaya Kato and Yoko Shimada among a cast of forty-one. Shot as a Canada, United States, France and Japan co-production on a budget of six million dollars, it runs 102 minutes.

Audience response has been moderate and consistent, with a rating of 6.4 out of 10 on IMDb from around 14,000 votes and the same score on TMDB from a much smaller base of 373. Gans went on to Brotherhood of the Wolf in 2001.