Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers

One Cut of the Dead director Shinichiro Ueda was next up on my screener viewing of films showing at the Japan Foundation’s Touring Film Programme, in the shape and form of Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers. No doubt the title riffing on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  

Meek tax officer Kumazawa (Seiyo Uchino) finds himself on the wrong end of a notorious tax evader, Tachibana (Ozawa Yukiyoshi) and scammed out of money he had saved for a car. But thanks to a cop friend, Kumazawa finds himself enlisting that same scammer, Himuro (Masaki Okada) to take down the tax evader 

Con movies are a curious sort of fun because they tend to work at their very best when either at their lightest and most playful (even if narratively complex and with an emotional trigger, such as The Sting and Ocean’s 11) or deeper and greyer, such as House of Games (the greatest ever, honestly) or Nine Queens. Angry Squad leans towards the former and it’s probably in the film’s favour as it opens with clearly a good man, Kumazawa, gently advising a young inn owner how to charge items as expenses. Though this is clearly against departmental targets, he’s just a little bit too timid, a bit too hen-pecked, a bit too gullible, to the point where you wonder how he could exist in the real world, or even a fictional one. I suspect Kumazawa’s character in the outset will be fine to most in the audience, but Uchino’s performance mugs it a little too often for my liking. I suspect it’s what he’s been asked to do, but it undermines his character because it feels as though, if a stranger walked up to him and said: give me your live savings, he’d say yes and would you like me to take my clothes off too, so that you can sell them too?

I would have liked Kumazawa to have been a bit more nuanced and rounded. As much of a fuss that I may be making of it, it’s not a big problem but it is perhaps for me the difference between Angry Squad having the potential to be a good film rather than a great one. I do suspect there may be cultural aspects explaining this, and certainly the moment that Tachibana pours a bottle of wine over the apologising Kumazawa, doing his utmost to utterly humiliate the man, is more universally understandable as to what the man is accepting to protect his future; but some of the aspects of his character could undermines how we view him in those moments when having to accept humiliation not only on his behalf but for others, something that is emotionally sympathetic and takes a special type of courage. It would be easy to see this as part of his weakling character as opposed to Kumazawa having a depth of character and humanity as the film intends.

Sometimes this early lightness works, there’s a lovely moment where Kumazawa’s wife asks him about work, he states a white lie and suddenly his daughter screams “liar!” And Kumazawa jumps. Has she seen through him? No, she’s rehearsing a part for the school play. So the film certainly knows how to have fun, and it has a lot of it. For any frustrations I had with the film it certainly never drags throughout any of its two-hours and as the story takes shape after 30-minutes, with Himuro entering into the story more significantly, it gains a more natural flow, with Kumazawa becoming more understandable though – thankfully – never undergoing too big a change of character. He never turns into some swaggering bullshitter, rather comes more to terms with his feelings, some of which run very deep. Equally Himuro, whose character at the start feels a bit too glib and slick, immediately starts to strut and breathe, just as it should because he’s the scammer who is in the know. Whereas initially he may seem a bit too obvious, he becomes the right side of human, and of course he should always retain an element of mystery and being slightly unknowable as scammers should be.

Of course much of the film is caught up with the act of taking back the money from the real-estate tax evader and arch-bastard Tachibana, and again this is always an intriguing prospect because con movies are intrinsically slippery creatures; however sleek they may be, bumps in the road must occur and the question becomes how they are overcome. Who is in the know? Who is being played? There are moments when it has potential to lose its way here, especially when some reveals suggest events are serving the story rather than the other way around, especially when some fail to stand up to scrutiny. Thankfully, when the final reveal is made, it all falls into place.

While it may not be a genre-defining con movie, there’s a lot right with it. Kumazawa’s relationship with his younger, ambitious female colleague has much to recommend it - this younger woman is about to leapfrog him via promotion; he could see as a threat, but if anything his sense of humanity and care for her causes him to accept humiliations others might balk at, and he does this with nothing in mind except to help someone so that they may do what he cannot with their career.  

It may not take its place in the pantheon of classic con movies but there’s a lot of fun and gentle humanity to be found. Perhaps more importantly there’s a sense of justice, too. 

Angry Squad: The Civil Servant and the Seven Swindlers is showing as part of the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme. Screenings can be found here.