Review: Shinjuku Incident

Music: Mika Nakashima- Venus In The Dark Mood: Relaxed, for the mo


Caution: DO NOT watch this movie if you are not in a good mood, it will make you feel bleak from begining till end.

Inspired by real life incidents, the story took place in the early 90's when Chinese struggled to make ends meet by immigrating illegally to Japan and were measley paid to do manual labouring jobs. Jackie Chan plays Steelhead who immigrated illegally to Japan in search of his girlfriend Xiu Xiu (Xu Jing Lei). He met up with Gao Jie (Daniel Wu) and stayed with a host of illegal Hongkies in Shinjuku. Steelhead then found out that Xiu Xiu is in fact married to a powerful Japanese Yakuza leader Eguchi (Kato Masaya) but saved his life by coincidence when he was targeted to be murdered. To consolidate power, Eguchi build an alliance with Steelhead to take revenge. Soon after, Steelhead was so deeply involved in the Yakuza ways that he did not realized it is impposible for him and his gang to return to the right track.


This is a breakthrough role for Jackie Chan as you are not going to see perfectly designed kungfu moves from him. Instead, he poured in much more acting skills and portrayed a character who don't joke around his life. Finally, he's a dirty bad ass.


Ignore the ABC slang, Daniel Wu can really act here. Without fancy clothes, he can still pull off this timid character rather well. In fact, he scares me when he became a hopeless drug addict who donned a gothic punk look later on.


This is my favourite man of the movie. Naoto Takenaka (竹中直人) plays Inspector Kitano who owe his life to Steelhead who saved him from drowning in the sewage. He is one of the most versatile Japanese actor I've ever seen. He is darn hilarious when he played Franz Stresemann, a pervert German conductor who speaks Japanese (yes, with a weird foreigner's accent!) in Nodame Cantabile (交响情人梦).


See what I mean?


Highest credits goes to Director Derek Yee (尔东升) who prepared the movie 10 years ago (!!) and console information since 1995. He has gathered the best actors around the region and even got his brother Paul Cheng (秦沛) to act a rather kalefe character here.


Oh for some of you who didn't know, Paul Cheng, Jiang Da Wei (姜大卫) and Derek Yee are real-life brothers.

TVB drama followers will definitely recognize these famous brothers.






I find that people get killed too easily here. Some big shots can be murdered as easily as swatting a fly, or flying stones can kill a person immediately. Well actually, this is initially a three-hour R-rated movie. It's being reduced to a little less than two hours after much gory scenes has been taken out. So Daniel Wu actually died a very horrible death and so did other perished characters.

This is a turning point for Jackie Chan even though he's ten years late on the road. Quoted by him: "Help me to change! I'd rather be late than never. If you can't accept me here, then I think I better go back to shoot Rush Hour 4 lo..."