Mr. Long is a master of knife art – and not just in the traditional sense. His special talent has earned the secretive Taiwanese veteran a reputation as a ruthless assassin in the seedy underworld. But when a job suddenly goes wrong and Long gets stuck in Tokyo, seriously injured, the weakened pro faces up to the adverse circumstances, and with the help of a young boy he turns his attention towards his true passion: cooking.
The new gangster drama by the Japanese provocateur Hiroyuki Tanaka, who here goes by the alias of Sabu, is a film that gets by with few words and highly restrained movements, but still manages to pull out all the stops. Various entanglements and a team of gloriously intrusive supporting characters make Mr. Long an emotional roller coaster, which will make your legs tremble by the end. As usual with the director and actor, who was born in 1964 in Wakayama, the whole thing is captured in precise, emphatic images and embedded in a complex narrative, which is neither afraid of melancholy moments nor brutal violence, and presents even the most absurd chain of events in a way that is both plausible and highly worth seeing.
