‘Violence Action’: Quirky killer lacks an element of surprise

Some movies have titles that tell you exactly what you’re in for, such as Andy Warhol’s notorious “Empire,” an eight-hour film from 1965 that’s just an unchanging view of the Empire State Building in New York.

Another is Toichiro Ruto’s “Violence Action,” based on the eponymous webcomic by Renji Asai and Shin Sawada. Given the high volume of action scenes — from mano-a-mano fights to a lengthy car chase sequence — the film’s action director, Keiya Tabuchi, deserves equal billing to Ruto, whose credits include the 2018-19 TV Asahi show “Ossan’s Love” and its big-screen adaptation.

Actress Kanna Hashimoto is not known as an action star, however, and scenes of her punching, kicking, slashing and blasting opponents as the pink-haired hitwoman Kei Kikuno are like artfully choreographed and stroboscopically edited dance routines. Those hoping for realistic martial arts action had best look elsewhere.

But the film captures the insouciantly bloody-minded spirit of the manga, in which Kei, a wide-eyed vocational school student majoring in bookkeeping, casually kills strangers as a part-time gig. In contrast to the many mainstream actioners here with body counts of zero, "Action Violence” generates corpses in large, mostly nameless, quantities.

The manga, however, is also populated by eccentric characters who are funny and scary in various measures. In the movie, co-scripted by Ruto, some of these oddballs remain, such as a woman-scorning, ridiculously macho hitman (Yu Shirota). Others, however, including a portly marijuana farmer/gangster who verbally and physically channels director Takeshi Kitano, do not, leaving the film less multiflavored than it could have been.

Similarly altered is the close relationship that grows between Kei and Daria (Yuuri Ota), a prickly short-haired sniper with a troubled past. Hints of a same-sex romance that the comic suggests are replaced in the film by the duller conventional feelings that develop between Kei and Terano (Yosuke Sugino), a sharp-eyed young yakuza who handles his gang’s finances.

Terano is also the main player in the film’s central story of a rivalry between two sub-bosses — the ruthless up-and-comer Kinoshita (Katsunori Takahashi) and the stolid old-guard Kunitsu (Hyodo Daiki) — for the leadership of the Kanto region’s biggest gang, even though the present boss (Jiro Sato) is still hale, hearty and a habitual teller of dad jokes.

This story of internecine gang warfare is hardly new and “Violence Action” does little to reinvent it. Its most interesting twist is Kei, who is hired by the boss to kill Terano for dipping into the boss’s stash. She becomes Terano’s ally, however, after he helps her prepare for an upcoming bookkeeping exam while fighting for his life.

Kei’s sudden shifts between her deadly side job and her “real” life with Watanabe (Oji Suzuka), a mild-mannered classmate with a pudding-bowl haircut and crush on her, and other normies are played for broad comedy, but the story also dips into more serious waters that are all-too unconvincing since Kei is the strangest character of them all.

Hashimoto valiantly tries to humanize her, but for all her likable attributes, her ever-upbeat attitude among them, a mystery remains: How does Kei transform from a cold-eyed killer to a cute student as if flipping a switch? But clarifying it with sobersided flashbacks and the rest would kill the fun, wouldn’t it?