Re:Born: One Of The Best Assassin Action Movies (That Flew Under The Radar)

The Japanese action film Re:Born has been curiously overlooked in the West, despite being one of the best assassin movies of all time. Released in Japan in 2016, Re:Born sees Tak Sakaguchi portray an unassuming convenience store owner with a dark past. Over the course of the film, hundreds of other characters learn the hard way that this seemingly modest individual is actually the most lethal assassin on the planet.

First being released in North America as a Shudder exclusive movie before quietly dropping on Blu-ray and digital download in July 2020, Re:Born hasn’t drawn the kind of attention one might expect. In an era where the John Wick series, The Equalizer movies, and Atomic Blonde are rightly praised for raising the bar for action movies, Re:Born deserves to sit alongside them as one of the best – and perhaps even the best – of the assassin subgenre. In that respect, Re:Born is a lot like its own protagonist, both quietly going unnoticed by countless passers by and leaving all who see their concealed might firsthand in the most profound shock imaginable.

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Of course, everyone loves a good surprise, and a Japanese action movie, with an ambiguous-sounding title and a leading man known to die-hard martial arts fans, emerging as an instant classic among assassin films certainly qualifies. How and why it has stayed so unnoticed among English-speaking audiences is a real head-scratcher, but Re:Born is at a level for every assassin movie to aspire to.

Tak Sakaguchi’s Early Career

Prior to his work in action movies, Tak Sakaguchi fought in many underground fights, which led to him being discovered by Ryuhei Kitamura. It was Kitamura who recognized Sakaguchi’s tremendous abilities in martial arts and felt he would be perfect for the movie he was developing at the time, which would become 2000’s Versus. A wacked-out cross-pollination of zombies, yakuza, fist-and-foot action, and samurai swordplay, Versus is as much an embodiment of the term cult classic as there’s ever been with its story of an unnamed, escaped prisoner finding himself at the center of a plan to open a portal to “the other side” in the mystical Forest of Resurrection. Versus is exactly as action-packed and crazy-in-a-good-way as it sounds, and it paved the way for the careers of both Sakaguchi and Kitamura.

Sakaguchi would go onto appear in other Japanese action films, re-teaming with Kitamura on Alive and, later, Azumi, and he would also be seen in movies like Azumi 2: Death or Love, Death Trance, Tokyo Gore Police, and Mutant Girls Squad, along with 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars, for which he also served as fight choreographer. Sakaguchi would later go into retirement for a period of time, but would eventually return to movies with director Yuji Shimomura’s Re:Born, and in doing so made one of the crowning achievements of assassin-based action films.

Re:Born Set A New Standard For Assassin Movies

In Re:Born, Sakaguchi portrays Toshiro Kuroda, a former special forces soldier codenamed Ghost, who now runs a small convenience store and is looking after a young girl when his old life catches up to him. Re:Born wastes no time in establishing that Toshiro is less of a killing machine than he is death incarnate, with an unsplit pair of chopsticks being a lethal weapon in his hands. While the first half of Re:Born is something of a slow burn amid Toshiro’s casual slaying of enemies who cross his path, the second half simply has to be seen to be believed.

Re:Born‘s action scenes are plentiful and as hard-hitting as they come. However, the movie’s forest battle was the set piece meant to be the most seared into the minds of viewers, with Toshiro and two associates facing over 100 camouflaged adversaries, in what is without question one of the best martial arts movie battles of the last 25 years, if not longer. Re:Born overall is full of amazing action scenes, including the final showdown, but its the forest battle that really seals it as one of the greatest assassin movies, an out of control whirlwind that’s as brutal and visceral as the teahouse battle in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and every bit as enthralling in its very lengthy timespan. Sakaguchi also makes Toshiro completely believable as the deadliest man walking the Earth, consistently poised and calm and rhythmically rolling his shoulders when the time has come to unleash his hidden skills.

Why Re:Born Deserves Your Attention

One would think that Re:Born would have been heralded as the closest thing to The Raid 3 as soon as it debuted in the West, yet its North American release has been surprisingly low-key. The current trend of action movies has been in the direction of the assassin subgenre since the rise of John Wick, and with Re:Born inarguably being among the best ever made, that makes its comparatively low profile even more baffling. Chalk it up to Sakaguchi not being as well-known outside of Japan or simply the marketing not managing to grab enough people, but whatever the reason, Re:Born has taken assassin movies to a whole new level with few even noticing it happening.

Throughout the film, Toshiro shows that he can turn practically anything into an instrument of assassination, a talent he displays on the fly with a pen and an empty handgun magazine as bullets whizz past him. Sakaguchi also learned a newer discipline for the movie called Zero Range Combat, and whether on the shorter side – like the phone booth confrontation – or as extensive and elaborate as the war of blades in the forest, the movie’s martial arts battles are as astonishing as it gets. As portrayed by Sakaguchi, Toshiro is an assassin who almost never exhibits anything but ennui in a fight, which, considering his near-invincibility, isn’t difficult to comprehend. With most action heroes encountering at least a few enemies who can hold their own, Re:Born stands out in presenting Toshiro as the most utterly insurmountable assassin who has ever lived, only putting him up against an enemy on his level in the final showdown (fittingly played by Zero Range Combat creator Yoshitaka Inagawa).

Action movies focused on covert soldiers, spies, and assassins certainly aren’t going anywhere, yet few are as finely-tuned and breathtakingly action-packed as Re:Born, while Tak Sakaguchi’s portrayal of Toshiro is one of the greatest movie assassins there’s ever been. The fact that all of that holds true, despite the movie having seen such low-level praise in the Western world, is perplexing, to say the least, but it’s nevertheless taken assassin movies to a new tier that all should now collectively shoot for. Sakaguchi’s newest movie Crazy Samurai Musashi makes a similar gambit to push martial arts films further, pitting the titular hero Miyamoto Musashi against hundreds of samurai enemies in a 77-minute battle captured in a single shot. Perhaps once it’s been widely released in North America, Re:Born will finally begin to reach the heights of acclaim that it truly deserves.

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