My Cultural Diet

Before he rose to fame for the Baby Assassins movies, Yugo Sakamoto directed this low-budget action thriller about a yakuza assassin who’s tasked with protecting his boss’ daughter by moonlighting as her school’s janitor. It’s a fairly low-key job until the boss is assassinated and rival factions seek to kidnap the daughter for their own greedy ends. Unfortunately, A Janitor’s promising efforts to be a slow-burning thriller are hampered by the fact that it’s a pretty tedious movie, with bizarre tonal shifts — one minute it’s a gritty yakuza flick, the next a black comedy, and so on — and a storyline that gets less and less interesting as it proceeds. All of that might be forgivable were the action entertaining, but the film’s fights are hyper-edited Bourne-like messes that often left me thinking of better movies that I could be watching instead.

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