Fantastic Fest 2009

Tokyo is under attack! Not by the military, no, peace treaties signed with the US and UK have assured it of peace for the foreseeable future. And no, not from giant monsters, either. This just isn't that sort of movie. No, Tokyo is besieged by a fearsome master criminal, the unstoppable thief known only as The Fiend With Twenty Faces. Under normal circumstances the poor lower classes would happily side with someone who preyed upon the oppressive rich but when the dastardly Fiend frames one of their own, one small community rises up to train the wrongfully accused until he can become a worthy adversary for the Fiend, worthy enough to succeed in bringing the master criminal down to clear his own name.

 

Set in an alternate past in which World War II never happened, Tokyo has been renamed Teito, technology followed the path of Tesla rather than Edison and Japan clung to a slightly modernized form of the classical caste system, K-20 stars Takeshi Kaneshiro (House of Flying Daggers) as Heikichi Endo, a talented but overlooked acrobat framed for the crimes committed by the Fiend. Forced to live a life on the run from the law, Heikichi is left with no choice but to channel his skills towards justice rather than entertainment. To catch the Fiend, he must effectively become the Fiend himself...

 

A big budget, high energy, steampunk oriented take on the American masked-crimefighter genre, K-20 starts off with a character from the works of legendary author Edogawa Rampo and turns it in to large scale populist entertainment. Takeshi Kaneshiro makes for a dashing hero, one reliant on natural acrobatic skills and an array of clever gadgets rather than on any supernatural abilities to best his foes, his intelligence at least as important as his strength. The tone is light, the action brisk, the retro-futurist look matched by an approach to comedy and romance that owes more to the 1940s in which it is set than to the age and technology that makes that setting possible. In a time when American hero movies are becoming increasingly grim and bleak, K-20 serves as a candy-coated remedy. (Todd Brown)