Everything in Branded to Kill is fetishised to the point of odd whimsicality –
characters obsess over the smell of boiled rice, assassin-ranking systems, butterflies,
dead birds, sniper-scopes, gun-barrels, naked female bodies and the director
himself creates one super-collage of dedicated fetish-imagery by shooting
everything either in long telephoto lenses or front-on – thereby either
creating ‘pretty pictures’ out of every goddamn object or reducing it to its
most fundamental, as-it-is form. There is nothing that exists if not to serve
purely surface-level pleasure; there are no great ideas about imperialism as in
Gate of Flesh or genre-reflection
like Tokyo Drifter, but as
pop-objects go, it is
one helluva film.
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