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If Chiba’s karate films and the Sister Streetfighter series had been influenced by Shaw Brother’s kung fu films, Roaring Fire (吼えろ鉄拳, Hoero Tekken) is an homage to contemporary action and in some senses anticipates Jackie Chan and heroic bloodshed though in other ways harking back to the classic serial with its diamond-themed MacGuffin. A vehicle for rising action star Hiroyuki Sanada, the film reflects a new internationalist Japan but also confronts the toxic legacy of the feudal past in the fall of a once noble house.
Joji (Hiroyuki Sanada) has spent his entire life on a ranch in Texas only to discover from a deathbed confession by the man that he thought was his father that he had been kidnapped as an infant and is actually the son of the wealthy Hinohara family. But on travelling there, he immediately finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy. His twin brother Toru has gone missing after going to London to study ophthalmology in order to cure his sister Chihiro’s (Etsuko Shihomi) eye condition. Though his uncle, Ikki (Mikio Narita), welcomes him with open arms, a weird ventriloquist act by a man called Mr. Magic (Shinichi Chiba) that he’s taken to see suggests that the plane crash his parents died in may not have been an accident and his uncle killed them to take over the family business.
Ikki is mixed up in the drugs trade with Hong Kong Triads and in keeping with Suzuki’s other films, we once again have a new solution to smuggling in hiding drugs in underripe banana skins. Lured to Ikki’s underground lair which has a large photo of Hitler on the wall and other Nazi memorabilia scattered around, Joji is given the “join us or die” speech, but ultimately manages to escape with some help from Abdullah the Butcher who is working as some kind of bodyguard but apparently takes a liking to Joji and declares they will be the best of friends forever after their initial fight. In any case, we soon realise that Ikki’s purpose in life is feudal revenge in that his mother was a geisha who died young because of her poverty and the nature of her work while staring at the Hinohiras’ giant mansion though his father apparently took no responsibility for him until after his mother died. His only goal in life is to take over the estate and otherwise destroy the rest of the family that never fully accepted him.
Of course, Joji is in his way, but Joji doesn’t really want this legacy either and only wants to save his sister who turns out to be a kung fu ace despite her blindness but is otherwise unable to escape. In his final confrontation with Ikki, he reclaims the name of the man who raised him, Hibiki, and rejects that of Hinohara as if symbolically refusing his feudal inheritance. Mr Magic, really an Interpol agent, makes an executive decision to let him go which is also a representative authority figure setting him, and the younger generation, free from the feudal legacy to live a more international life.
Nevertheless, Suzuki fills the film with a series of high-impact action sequences and extreme stunt work such as a crazy bus chase through Hong Kong which predates that in Police Story by a few years. The shuttles back and forth between Hong Kong and Japan, but it’s clear here that Ikki and his weird Nazi cohorts are the villains rather than the Hong Kong gangsters who really just exist and otherwise only factor into the story because of their desire for Queen of Sheba diamond that Joji’s birth father hid before he died so Ikki wouldn’t get his hands on it. A possibly poor taste allusion to the holocaust aside, Suzuki sticks to the plucky teen adventure format in which Joji gets into fights with the local guys and is quickly befriended by Chihiro’s teenage friends who all hang out at the mansion, rather than opt for a gloomy sense of paranoia and conspiracy even as Joji finds himself at the centre of a Hamlet-esque plot in which his uncle has usurped the throne and he must return to set it right. Yet rather than restoring the existing order, Joji effectively resets it by ending the family’s influence and then moving on into a freer existence shorn of filial responsibilities.
Trailer (no subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 