An outrageous contemporary Japenese genre-mongrel, "Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl" combines sentimental Yakuza gangster machismo with the fatalistic romance of the road movie and the dead-pan...

An outrageous contemporary Japenese genre-mongrel, "Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl" combines sentimental Yakuza gangster machismo with the fatalistic romance of the road movie and the dead-pan irreverence of vanguard Asian action cinema. Director Katsuhito Ishii pulls out all the stops in re-imagining Minetaro Mochizuki's popular Manga comic book for the screen, creating an avalanche of giddily graphic violence and a melee of offbeat gun-crazy characters. Distracted by the sight of a handsome, nearly naked man sprinting across a winding mountain road, Toshiko (Shie Kohinata) inadvertently interrupts a mob execution by crashing her car into a limo full of eccentric assassins. Fresh from a frenzied menage a trois, Belmondo-cool Samehada (Tadanobu Asano; "Taboo," "Ichi the Killer") seduces Toshiko into a life-or-death race with an army of mob killers joined by a moon-walking, love-struck amateur hit-man dispatched by Toshiko's depraved uncle. From the Yakuza assassins' color-coordinated guns to the shadow-dappled forests in which the film is set, "Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl" bursts with an urgently hypnotic collision of wild styles and flights of visual imagination.