Kin'yû fushoku rettô: Jubaku   1999   Japan Jubaku: Spellbound
Jubaku: Spellbound Image Cover
Additional Images
Director:Masato Harada
Studio:Kadokawa Publishing Company
Writer:Mugita Kinoshita, Satoshi Suzuki, Ryo Takasugi
IMDb Rating:7.1 (117 votes)
Awards:9 wins & 12 nominations
Genre:Drama
Duration:114 min
Languages:Japanese
IMDb:0221321
Search:NetflixYouTube
Masato Harada  ...  (Director)
Mugita Kinoshita, Satoshi Suzuki, Ryo Takasugi  ...  (Writer)
 
Kôji Yakusho  ...  Hiroshi Kitano
Tatsuya Nakadai  ...  Hideaki Sasaki
Kippei Shiina  ...  Akio Katayama
Ikuji Nakamura  ...  Hideki Matsubara
Ken'ichi Yajima  ...  Takuya Ishii
Jun Fubuki  ...  Kyoko Kitano
Mayumi Wakamura  ...  Miho Wada
Yumi Takigawa  ...  Nobue Aoki
Jinpachi Nezu  ...  Kohei Nakayama
Tetsurô Tanba  ...  Tajiro Kawakami
Hitomi Kuroki  ...  Hiro Sato
Kei Satô  ...  Takashi Hisayama
Renji Ishibashi  ...  Nakazawa
Ken'ichi Endô  ...  Onogi
Taketoshi Naitô  ...  Stockholder 780
Yoshitaka Sakamoto  ...  Cinematographer
Kippei Shîna  ...  Akio Katayama
Masahiro Kawasaki  ...  Composer
Akimasa Kawashima  ...  Editor
Summary: Following the smash success last year of Bayside Shakedown comes Masato Harada's Jubaku (Spellbound), with a theme that is nothing less than the iron triangle of business, bureaucracy and underworld gangs which have dominated the history of postwar Japan. With a plot that reads like a newspaper investigative series, the film risks being flattened into the cinematic equivalent of good, grey journalese. However Harada has injected a visual dynamism and narrative pace that is very Hollywood, while respecting the integrity of a story that is, in its complexity and ambiguity, very Japanese. Also, while being unsparing and unsentimental in its portrayal of institutional crime and corruption, Jubaku presents a group portrait considerably more attractive that the usual image of Japanese businessmen as nerdy drones.

When a major bank is caught paying off a corporate extortionist, the media and prosecutors begin to dig, breaking open a money-and-favours scandal that threatens to rock the entire structure of business and government to its core. While the bank's top executives continue to vacillate, a quartet of middle-management reformers, led by straight-arrow Kitano (Koji Yakusho), decide to stage a boardroom coup and install a new, clean management team. With the aid of a hotshot news anchor (Miho Wada) and a hard-nosed prosecutor (Kenichi Endo), heads begin to roll.


Search: AmazonMRQERoviAsianmediawikiHanCinemaWikipediaMetacritic