A Colt is My Passport

Joe Shishido stars as Kamimura, a contract killer caught in a web of criminal intrigue that - one unusually thorough assassination aside - has more in common with the creeping avarice of a corporate merger than it does street-level passions. Kamimura is a methodical criminal, a cold-blooded presence who, when he's left to his own devices, is better tuned to the detached rhythms of staking out his quarry and thinking through the mechanical processes of their termination. Director Takashi Nomura and screenwriters Shuichi Nagahara and Nobuo Yamada build their opening moments around a similar sort of incidental expertise as that exhibited by James Bond in the early Terence Young entries: having settled into a vacant nest overlooking his target's garden, Kamimura lights a cigarette; not to calm his nerves but so he can hold it out of a window to judge the wind directions that will soon be acting upon his gunfire. This predatory, reptilian intelligence, so suited to generating and extinguishing turmoil, is less useful in A Colt is My Passport's middle-section. There the heaving drama is turned over to Chitose Kobayashi's Mina, a forlorn truck stop worker who fixates on Kamimura, imagining some sort of emotional connection between herself and a murderer simply seeking safe passage out of the country. This interruption ends up working for Nomura's film, suggesting a conclusion far less exciting than the one we end up getting: Shishido running straight at the camera, firing every gun he can lay his hands on.