Kikujiro

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano has one of the great movie faces: with his stony walnut of a mug, ineffably battered and looking capable of dishing out the same, he resembles a Japanese Charles Bronson. He uses that face to mute, ironic effect in such flinty, hard-boiled detective and gangster thrillers as Fireworks and Sonatine. But here, Kitano unwisely comes out of his shell. A sentimental comedy, Kikujiro demonstrates that the filmmaker's cryptic façade doesn't hide a gift for snappy patter and pratfalls -- at least not on the big screen or in translation (Kitano is a famed stand-up comic and talk-show host in Japan).

In the long tradition of the old-codger/cute-kid odd coupling that won a Best Foreign Film Oscar a couple of years ago for Central Station, Kikujiro follows its henpecked title hero (Kitano) after he's coerced by his wife (Kayoko Kishimoto) into accompanying a charmless neighbor boy Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) across Japan to find his mother. As road movies go, this one is especially contrived, what with Kikujiro trying to get beyond being an embittered asshole (his mother left him, too) by bonding with the doughy, inert Masao and abusing strangers and becoming, instead, a sentimental asshole who thinks he's funny. Kitano's use of quick cuts to punch-line a gag and his long takes in the Jim Jarmusch mode arouse halfhearted smiles, but the film's long coda of lame shtick shows why he should stick to deadpan tragedy.

-- Peter Keough