It's 1963 and the Kurashima City yakuza underworld has narrowed to two warring clans. The Kawade gang uses political influence to legitimatize their rackets, while the Ohara group shares an uneasy alliance with corrupt local cops. But when Boss Ohara initiates a bold waterfront land-grab, the precarious balance between gangsters, police, and politicians tips towards a bloodbath. "Drop dead, it'll clean the city," growls the Violence Squad's Detective Kuno to a group of Kawade assassins en route to a night club massacre. But Kuno's own hands are not spotless. Torn between his childhood connections with a yakuza kingpin, mounting pressure from reformer superiors, and the trigger happy gun-lust that led him to the police force in the first place, Kuno occupies the eye of Cops vs. Thugs' full-force hurricane of ferocious action. Coolly supplementing the body count on both sides, Kuno is a quick-triggered pilgrim in a world where, "gangsters and cops are the same. They both respect codes and laws."

From an impromptu precinct men's room conjugal visit to a bicycle-mounted beheading, Cops vs. Thugs sneaks scathing social critique inside a blood-spattered soufflé of audacious photography and grisly violence, garnished with Toshiaki Tsushima's wah-wah driven score.

The police have had their hands full for the last half a decade or so. Yakuza gangs have been very active and as a result of that, the crime rate has risen to the point where they've had no choice but to do something about it. Though they've made great strides, there are still two major thorns in their side. Some of the problems stem from the Kawade gang, they've got some serious political ties thanks to an arrangement with a congressman that lets them get away with a little more than your average gang of crooks. On the other hand, there's also the Ohara Gang, who have connections with local law enforcement officials. The leader of the Ohara's, Kenji Hirotani, even manages to get police cooperation in a land deal he's brokering, ensuring that the law looks the other way when it's time for him to seal the deal.

Unfortunately for Kenji, his boss, who was previously in prison doing hard time, has been released and has ideas about taking back control of the Ohara gang and making them go legit. Kenji has just started to like the taste of the power he's had and so this is obviously going to cause some conflict among the gangsters. To complicate things even further, there's a new cop on the force, Detective Kuno (the perpetually cool Bunta Sugawara of The Tattooed Hitman), and he's not as susceptible to bribes and threats as most of the cops in the area seem to be. In fact, if Kuno has his way, the police will be cleaning up the streets and ridding the area of Yakuza Kuno's commanding officer doesn't like the way he wants to handle things, and he intends to reel him in a bit, but it might already be too late, as Kuno has a serious chip on his shoulder and he's had about all he can take. With the two clans more or less at war with each other and a rogue cop shooting first and asking questions later, it would seem inevitable that sooner, rather than later, it's all going to hit the fan…

By 1975, Kinji Fukasaku had enough crime films under his belt that he really did know what he was doing. As his work in the genre evolved, his films started to become less idealized and romanticized and an obvious trend started to appear within his work – it was getting dirtier. Not dirty in the pornographic sense, but dirty in the way that a down to earth and realistic movie about the criminal underworld should be. No longer were the characters he was making movies about good guys underneath it all, most of the characters he was dealing with were bastards, out for themselves with little regard as to who got in their way. In an interesting contrast to that, however, both the titular cops and thugs subscribe to a similar code of ethics under which they operate. Though these may be rough and violent men, they still have a strange sense of honor that they subscribe to, even if at times the definition of that honor is stretched pretty thin.

The first half of the film is chaos, there's a lot going on and no one central character for the audience to latch on to but this is corrected easily enough when Kuno is introduced. While he's still not a lead in the typical sense he is at least a character that we can identify with, party Harry Callahan and part Hattori Hanzo. With Sugawara in that role, the film has no shortage of cool posturing and grimacing for the camera, he comes off as just as tough as you'd expect a man tasked with fighting crime should be. He's not above Fukasaku's criticism, however, and at times he's painted in a similar light to the very crooks he's trying to stop. The movie asks a lot of questions about right and wrong and about where ones morals should come in to play in terms of economic stability and survival. It also It points fingers at not only the cops and the thugs in the film but also the newspaper men, hungry for a story and so eager to cash in on the stories unfolding to make a quick dollar – just like the very same men they're reporting on and making money off of. It's all a vicious circle.

Cops Vs. Thugs is an angry film, it's violent, it features more than one instance of brutal rape, and it doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the world that it takes place in. It's also extremely well made, very well acted, and unfortunately rather poignant.

Final Thoughts: ...Cops Vs. Thugs is a fantastic slice of tough and gritty Yakuza action. Highly recommended for fans of the genre, and recommended for everyone else with even a remote interest in crime movies or Japanese cinema.