(This review contains spoilers)
The image that often comes to mind for those who say “Jin-Roh,” “Panzer Cop” or, in some less savory circles, “mecha right wing death squads” are ranks of men in stylized steel armor, German Stahlhelms, faces obscured by red-eyed gas masks, wielding MG42 machine guns that tear apart any opposition in seconds. The Panzer Cop of Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Oshii’s Kerberos (Lit., Cerberus) Saga is the icon of a rather obscure franchise that, although seen by many as a dark, gritty action anime/live action series, is a rather bleak, introspective and somber examination of the men (and women) who serve or had served in a lethal arm of the law in an alternate history of Japan. Of the three films that make up the saga; “The Red Spectacles,” “Stray Dog: Panzer Cop” and “Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade,” “Red Spectacles” is the most unconventional, yet perhaps a more interesting take on the series’ themes of authoritarianism, individual choices regarding one’s loyalty to it, and the guilt that a person’s actions can cause in their future.
The premise opens in an alternate 1980s Japan, one that has seen the brief but terrible reign of the armored enforcers that are the Kerberos unit. Japan had relied on them to fight rising criminality, but soon the unit began using its authority to commit various atrocities, including the murder and torture of various suspects. The unit is eventually cracked down on by the government, and Kerberos makes a last stand in their headquarters, most of their members either killed, arrested or escaping as fugitives. The film’s protagonist, Koichi, is one of the latter, escaping with two of his compatriots to a secret pickup zone, though only he is able to make it out. He promises his friends that he will return one day to rescue them, to see them again. This, of course, given his circumstances and that of the organization he was in, is a fantasy, but one he chooses to follow as he exiles himself from a Japan trying to crack down on its former law-enforcing bullet hose juggernauts.
Koichi returns three years later, to a Japan much changed-the country is far stricter and vigilant of people like Koichi, having learnt its lessons of handing authority to the Kerberos Panzer Cops to enforce its laws. Koichi travels to a hotel, where the film promptly leaves any aspect of its “grounded” territory as he takes out dozens of Japanese Public Security secret policemen with nothing but his bare hands (he shares a cold one with one of his foes, relishing it while his counterpart reacts negatively to the beer. Koichi promptly crushes him while making a Hulk impression right after the break). The film devolves into a strange cycle fromthereon out, with Koichi visiting various old friends, the feelings usually somber or melancholic, yearning for times when they were still powerful enforcers of the country, united by the camaraderie of the supposed noble goal they served. Koichi always gets promptly backstabbed by his friends, who turn out to be working for the secret police in exchange for immunity or better sentences.
Every time he is incapacitated, he finds himself being interrogated by the strangely cartoonish chief of Public Security, Bunmei (dressed in a Mao suit).
In these sequences, Bunmei constantly lays out Koichi’s crimes of various policing abuses, his fight against the crackdown on Kerberos and him fleeing the country a fugitive. Bunmei also exposes how Koichi’s friends have all turned against him and work for Public Security, yet despite this, Koichi holds out hope for his friends that they truly still believe in “the cause,” in their bond as agents of death, as Kerberos, literally the Gatekeepers to the Underworld. His faith is often proven right as his friends aid him in sequences where he wakes up from the interrogation chamber. Though all of them are thoroughly depressed and broken by their past and current circumstances, they still hold enough faith in their friend to help his fight and flight from Bunmei and Public Security.
However, as the sequence of events gets more and more insane, it becomes clear it’s only a temporary reprieve, the chase getting more serious, his friends serving only as temporary obstacles to a seemingly omnipotent enemy. The final sequence of him in the increasingly wacky world he finds himself ends in the rain, where a man in the iconic Panzer Cop gear faces him, impassive, armored, inhuman, machine gun leveled at Koichi’s chest. At this point, Koichi realizes the truth-his crimes were too great for him to have any form of redemption, any form of closure for him to move on. He dug his grave a long time ago, and the soldier facing him is, in a way, himself, ready to take him for what he has done.
Koichi shouts at the soldier to get it over with.
The scene cuts to Koichi, dead in the shower where his first fight with Public Security happened. Bunmei and Koichi’s friends, all turncoats as Bunmei had revealed, watch his body as Public Security cleans up the scene. Koichi’s entire adventure was a dying dream, a futile attempt by a man to fight a destiny he created for himself years ago, failing even in his dream to resolve it in his favor. Koichi’s briefcase that he carried through the whole film is opened, where all we see are red-tinted sunglasses piled all over its inside, creating a literal metaphor of “rose-tinted glasses,” as a time that Koichi may have remembered as nice, even amazing or fulfilling, yet for others was a time of terror and pain.
Koichi himself as a character is a semi-tragic, semi-comical action hero, diminutive for the archetypal 1980s action hero (Koichi’s actor Shigeru Chiba was a voice actor, this film being one of his first live action roles), capable of manly action yet also, at the same time, a punching bag for a Japan after his hide. His often comical, manly demeanor throughout is broken up by sad nostalgia, dour disappointment and even a full emotional breakdown as he talks with his various friends throughout about their pasts and what this future holds for him. Unfortunately for Koichi, Japan has moved on and wants no part of him back, and so, in the end, Koichi goes out rather unceremoniously for his past crimes, his attempts to right his wrongs and to reposition himself a heroic man futile.
“The Red Spectacles” is a rather cynical piece in a series of dark, somber films, but it is also the funniest, wackiest and, in its own way, the best at delivering its themes subtly, something which its successors lacked (“Jin-Roh” has sometimes been criticized for its on the nose allusions). You can run for what you’ve done, but you can’t hide.
Overall, a great film, but the unconventional and often dream-like style of the plot can be very confusing to some, and I’d recommend its anime prequel, “Jin-Roh” for greater context.