Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler (Review)
Sunday, 25th July 2010, 19:30

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The Disc

Extra Features
The 44 minute Making Of featurette is well worth your time and attention as it goes through the origins of the manga in 1996 to the beginning of the filming process a decade later, going through various scenes, interviews with the actors and all of the visual effects and is your typical Japanese EPK piece which, I guess, was made for TV as you can tell where the commercial breaks were -- it probably would have been shown in a one hour slot on television. As with other pieces like this, the dialogue is subtitled in Japanese and English, occasionally overlapping which makes the English ones more difficult to read. You really need to concentrate as the narration is subtitled and Japanese captions appear on screen which are translated into English so you have two sets of subtitles on screen.

There is also the original Japanese trailer, a selection of trailers for other 4Digital Asia releases and a weblink.

The Picture
The anamorphic picture is probably an NTSC-PAL conversion but it bears little of the traditional compression artefacts, banding or aliasing that sometimes comes with such transfers.

By and large, the colours are either bright and vibrant or very dark and grim, depending on the location and tone. The contrast levels are similarly impressive, maintaining a high level of clarity even in the darkest situations and low light scenes. There is probably a great deal of CGI (especially when it comes to the Brave Man Road scene) that goes unnoticed as you pretty much know that it's there but really don't notice that it was shot against green screen.

The Sound
The only option is a Dolby Digital 2.0 Japanese track with excellent English subtitles and this does a tremendous job with the dialogue, score and surrounds as, if your amplifier can do Pro Logic II, you have the simulated surround with people chattering, machinery moving and wind blowing around. If not, then the majority of the film is front loaded and dialogue dominated with a great deal of the dialogue taking place inside Kaiji's head.

Final Thoughts
Kaiji: The Ultimate Gambler should really be called Kaiji: A Life or Death Game as that would be a more accurate and literal translation from the Japanese title while still maintaining the same 'punch'. However, that is only a minor niggle as the film itself is an extremely well orchestrated drama/thriller with a terrific central performance by Tatsuya Fujiwara. It was a massive hit in Japan, so much so that a sequel is on the way. I can't comment on how it stands up as an adaptation of the original manga or the anime series (there is one major change in that the character of Endo changes from a man in the manga and anime to a woman in the film) but, as a film judged on its own merits, it is extremely watchable and comes with a pretty good package.

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