New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Boss' Head Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Boss' Head Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman August 28, 2017

Note: This film is available as part of New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Complete Trilogy.

When is a franchise not a franchise? In the case of Kinji Fukusaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Complete Collection, it’s when studio bigwigs aren’t content to leave well enough alone and keep commissioning sequels even after the story has supposedly been told. As Fukusaku biographer Sadao Yamane details in one of the supplements included in this new three disc set, while the New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Complete Trilogy can themselves be seen as unconnected “sequels” that are in fact sequels in name only, that particular tendency arguably started earlier with the original Battles Without Honor and Humanity, which Yamane suggests really “ended” sooner than the initial quintet’s supposed organic wholeness might indicate. As I mentioned in our Battles Without Honor and Humanity Blu-ray review, Fukusaku’s name might not be that familiar to those outside of the Asian film fan community, even though he helmed the Japanese portions of the gigantic 1970 international co- production Tora! Tora! Tora!. In Japan, though, his contributions to the yakuza genre with the original Battles Without Honor and Humanity were perhaps unexpectedly huge hits in their day in their native country, something that of course sparked the interest in sequels to begin with. The original quintet brought a new quasi-historical aspect to Japanese crime sagas, something that Fukusaku attempts to continue in a similar approach with the secondary trilogy, though it’s at least questionable as to whether the New Battles Without Honor and Humanity really maintain the same level of visceral impact that the original pentalogy did. It’s also worth noting that Fukusaku, working with some new writers unaffiliated with the original five films, discards any real linking devices to those first five films, other than the fact that (probably for marketing purposes as much as anything else) he utilizes many of the same actors from the original series (in new, unrelated, roles).

The Boss’ Head forsakes the intramural conflict that informed much of New Battles Without Honor and Humanity in favor of a kind of internecine warfare that is at least somewhat similar to what was seen in several of the original Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Complete Collection. Bunta Sugawara is back again, this time as Shuji Koroda, less of an official yakuza gang member than kind of a hanger on who finds himself ensnared in subterfuge when he attempts to help a friend of his named Tetsuya Kusunoki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), who is a member of the Owada crime family and who has been tasked with taking out a rival.

Unfortunately Tetsuya is badly addicted to heroin, and suddenly has the urge to shoot up just as the intended target arrives on a commuter ferry. In one of the almost patented carnival like action sequences that Fukasaku seemed to be so fond of, everything goes haywire, with the result that Kuroda ends up killing the target, leading to his imprisonment, though with the promise of a substantial reward from Owada (Kō Nishimura) once he gets out of stir. Of course things don’t resolve as Kuroda might have hoped, and a kind of revenge scenario takes over when Kuroda’s promised riches don’t immediately materialize.

It’s interesting to note that in one of the supplements included in this set Fukasaku’s biographer Sadao Yamane makes the case that this second iteration of the franchise offers a female point of view on the time honored yakuza genre, I guess kind of like the way The White Queen and The White Princess revisit the intrigue of England’s historical past from the perspective of some of the women involved. That’s a somewhat hard case to make for New Battles Without Honor and Humanity, which is still pretty male-centric, but The Boss’ Head does offer a couple of really interesting female roles, including the kind of traditionally put upon woman with connections to both Odawa and Kusonoki, and another, perhaps more duplicitous, woman who is something of a “black widow”. While these characters are never really forcefully developed, their mere presence does signal something arguably slightly different and helps to give at least a little emotional undertow to some otherwise rote mechanics featuring Kuroda’s quest for personal justice.

New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Boss' Head Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Note: All three films in this set exhibit some of the same issues and overall appearance, so I will make some general comments about the trilogy before moving on to this particular film.

New Battles Without Honor and Humanity, The Boss' Head and Last Days of the Boss are presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Arrow Video with AVC encoded 1080p transfers in a variety of aspect ratios (not the uniform 2.35:1 mentioned in the verbiage below). The booklet Arrow provides inside this set's slipcase has the following pretty generic information on the transfers:

The three films in the New Battles Without Honor and Humanity are presented in their original aspect ratios of 2.35:1 and with their original mono sound. All three films were remastered in high definition and supplied for this release by Toei Company, Ltd.

The fact that there's no real information on the source element utilized or any restoration efforts may be one clue as to the decent if never totally spectacular appearance of all three films in this set. All three look at least somewhat faded, with a sometimes brown or yellow quality and an occasionally somewhat subdued palette. There are also inconsistencies with brightness which, while nowhere close to the luma anomaly levels seen in The Twilight Samurai, do tend to cast a kind of hazy miasma over selected moments. Grain is generally very well resolved throughout the three films, though it does have occasional chunkiness in some of the darkest moments.

The Boss' Head is presented in 2.40:1, again like New Battles Without Honor and Humanity, slightly wider than advertised. While more or less in the same general ball park as the appearance described in the review for the first film, I'm marking my score down a half point on this transfer since it suffers from some more roughness than the other two. As with New Battles Without Honor and Humanity, the opening Toie masthead looks pretty bad, but in this case that damaged, overly grainy, look continues into at least a couple of the establishing shots of the harbor where the first sequence takes place. The palette is also fairly drab in the opening few minutes, though it becomes at least relatively robust from about the 14:00 mark on, albeit still often on the kind of drab, brown side of things. There are some of the aforementioned brightness issues at play, along with some pretty anemic contrast (especially in the opening), with some very noticeable haziness in some of the jail scenes, especially those of Kuroda in what looks like solitary. While none of the transfer looks razor sharp, certain selected moments are pretty soft looking, and in fact actual focus pulling seems to add to the problems on occasion.

New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Boss' Head Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Boss' Head features the same generally fine sounding LPCM Mono track in the original Japanese as the other films in this set. Once again dialogue and effects are rendered cleanly, though occasional boxiness is noticeable, especially in some voiceover. Another almost espionage flavored score sounds fine if not especially energetic. There's none of the variability that's on display in the video element, and while narrow sounding a lot of the time, the track provides all elements with good prioritization and reasonable fidelity.

New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Boss' Head Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Koji Takada: New Stories, New Battles (1080p; 12:36) is a 2016 interview with the screenwriter, who discusses his collaboration with Fukusaku and his attempt to reinvigorate the franchise.


• Original Teaser (1080p; 1:03)


• Original Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:59)

New Battles Without Honor and Humanity: The Boss' Head Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Boss' Head has a couple of interesting diversionary tactics, including the whole heroin angle that subsumes several characters, but on the whole it's another fairly obvious and unambitious retread. The uptick in female involvement in this film is also somewhat unusual, and starts to give this trilogy a little identity of its own. This has the least pleasing video transfer of the three in Arrow's new set, if only incrementally, for those considering a purchase.