When tax collector Kumazawa Jino (Seiyo Uchino) is scammed out of his hard-earned bonus by a professional swindler he is, quite rightly, angry. He decides to go after the man, but when he does find Himuro (Masaki Okada) the scam artist does the unexpected, he offers him a deal: immunity in exchange for help taking down business mogul Tachibana (Yukiyoshi Ozawa) who humiliated Kumazawa and refuses to pay ¥1 million in taxes.

Cue the music because Kumazawa agrees to the deal, and he and Himuro prepare to execute their heist. What follows is a story as old as cinema. The duo puts together a team of expert swindlers. There’s the tech genius, the muscle, and the former actress who can become anyone they need, and they quickly get to work. 

For Kumazawa, who has never done anything like this before, that will require a lot more than the others. But what he lacks in experience, he delivers in terms of effort, as he makes it his mission to take down Tachibana no matter what it takes. And so ensues the kind of narrative you’d expect from a film of this nature, as the team goes head-to-head against Tachibana.

While it doesn’t have the same grungy, amateur charm of the director’s debut, One Cut of the Dead!, Angry Squad is still a good time. It’s hard to mess up a heist movie; swindlers are just the perfect protagonists for the big screen because they’re charming yet dangerous, and their penchant for taking from the rich means they’re easy to get behind, in fiction at least.

Angry Squad hits all the right notes for a heist movie, and by virtue this means it’s a little predictable. We see Kumazawa go from amateur to would-be swindler, and while the team gets very little character backstory or development apart from Himuro, they’re still charming. There are some surprises in store for viewers as their heist gets underway, but this is largely a film you’ve seen before.

Even so, Angry Squad is entertaining and executed well from both a narrative and acting perspective, so there’s a lot to enjoy throughout the story. It might not be anything new, but it’s a lot of fun, and in this case, that’s enough.

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Written by Roxy Simons

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