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Title:
  Golgo 13 - The Professional Special Edition

UK Distributor:  Manga Entertainment (DVD Only)

BBFC Certificate:  18

Suggested Retail Price (SRP):  £19.99

Running Time:  mins (approx.)

Audio Options:  English 5.1 & 2.0, Japanese 5.1 & 2.0

Subtitles:  English

Reviewer:  Rich (Webmaster)

 

He is the ultimate in hired killers.  A man who will do any job for the right price.  A man who asks for a reason for each job, but passes no judgement.  Implacable, unstoppable, emotionless... His name may be Duke Togo, but few know him by anything other than his codename - Golgo 13.

Golgo 13 is one of Japan's most popular manga characters, a stony-faced assassin who has been plying his trade in manga periodicals for decades.  Golgo 13 The Professional was his first anime outing, and back in the early 90's it was the kind of title that epitomised what can still be called anime's UK heyday.  It has everything people expected from 'manga' videos at the time - violence, gore, tonnes of action, sex and swearing.  The plot of Golgo 13 The Professional is not so much one cohesive story but a sequence of standalone segments bookended by the start and end of a single story.  Golgo is hired at the start of the film to assassinate the heir to a wealthy conglomerate, and following that we get to see him take on a number of other jobs before he faces off against assassins hired by the conglomerate's current head to take revenge.
 

And that's it.  He spends the film being hired by various people, killing other people, and sleeping with women who invariably get killed not long after.  It's like James Bond but without the charm or the justification, just a cold hearted womanising killer who always manages to get the job done.  You know he's going to succeed, and the problem with knowing the outcome is that how he does it becomes the most important thing.  Films like this have to be inventive and the characters interesting, and that's where James Bond wins out and Golgo 13 suffers a bit.

Heavy shading doesn't make something good.

 
On the plus side it must be said that most of the ways he kills his targets is pretty well thought out and there's plenty of action in the run up to each hit.  However, Golgo himself has as much personality as a flatpack from Ikea.  You could probably get away with this if the enemies were interesting, but unfortunately the film is populated with stock femme-fatales, bog-standard maniacal soldiers and the usual crap hitmen with rubbish names.  You want some interesting stories, but most segments seem like something out of a TV movie.  It's real B movie stuff for the most part, with cheesy slow-mo shots of women horse riding and sunsets.  The only reasons it ever sold well was because it contains a) violence b) sex and c: some genuinely good animation.
 

Believe it or not, there are actually crapper villians than this guy in Golgo 13

 The animation is Golgo 13: The Professional's strongest hand.  Heavy, noirish shading backs up the moody scenes, whilst the action scenes are fast paced and surprisingly slick.  Care has been taken with the settings and there are some decidedly cool moments - particularly when Golgo implausibly completes one hit by shooting someone through a skyscraper.  If there was more of this in the film it would be good.  Unfortunately though the great animation and decent art is let down by two things, firstly the incredibly 80's style of a lot of it, and secondly a point near the end of the film when it switches inexplicably to

incredibly primitive CGI.  Ok, at the time it may have been impressive, but now it looks worse than the Virtua Racer on the Megadrive.  It looks awful compared the normal art and animation, and actually ruins one of the best segments of the film.

Whilst it's true that there are some good action scenes and some inventive assassinations, the stories are generally unengaging and the final twist pretty implausible.  The animation and art is good for the most part but the characters are rubbish.  The fact that Golgo - a man whose facial features move slower than continental drift - is the most engaging character in it is a feat in itself.  At the end of the day Golgo 13 The Professional is an old-fashioned cheesy action move packed with sex and violence, and little else.  It's not awful but time really has moved on, if you hanker after the past you may want to give it a look, but otherwise check out one of the hundreds of vastly superior anime series already available here.

Extras:

Fair play to Manga Entertainment, they have really pulled out the stops for this.  As well as the usual trailers they have also squeezed on English and Japanese DTS audio tracks, a sneak peek at the forthcoming animated Hellboy film and an interview with the film's producer Mata Yamamoto.  However, the best extra (and the one that puts it up to five stars) is the audio commentary from Anime Encyclopaedia co-author Jonathan Clements.  The commentary is extremely informative and makes the film a hell of a lot more interesting.  Jonathan's 'Clementary' is worth buying the DVD for alone.

Ratings

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