'Demon City' Review: A Yakuza Hitman Gets His Revenge in Netflix's Fun and Bloody 'John Wick' Riff

Have you ever watched a "John Wick" movie and thought to yourself, "I wonder if this would be even better if it were a little more lurid, a hell of a lot dumber, and its soundtrack had roughly 9,000 times as much flash-microwaved cheese rock?" Well, good news! Netflix — whose original content often feels like a response to a rhetorical question no human being has ever thought to ask — has you covered and then some with "Demon City," a fun Japanese action film that adds exactly nothing to the "retired hitman seeks revenge" sub-genre and has a decent time doing it.

Aggressively pared down from Masamichi Kawabe's sprawling manga series "Onigoroshi" (which spans more than 150 chapters and counting), Seiji Tanaka's adaptation ditches the supernatural overtones of its source material in order to pursue a lean — and very mean — tale of yakuza requital. "Honey & Clover" actor Toma Ikuta stars as Sakata, the deadliest assassin in all of Shinjo City, and "Demon City" makes good on that reputation over the course of a prologue that highlights the cleverness of the film's hyper-violence.

Sakata's one-man siege on a yakuza safehouse isn't anything you haven’t seen before, but the sequence is littered with devious little moments of visual ingenuity that demand your attention (e.g., an audiovisual gag that rhymes a decapitation with a gushing lawn sprinkler). The massacre, of course, was supposed to be Sakata’s "one last job" before he put his snub-nosed meat cleaver away for good and settled into his life as the most loving dad; we even see him stand in a shower and watch the water bead down his scars in slow-motion, the universal sign for “I’m putting my past life behind me.”

Alas, the local crime syndicate has other plans, and Sakata barely has time to change into his sweatpants before his home is invaded by some ruthless gangsters wearing scary demon masks. The bad guys seem to think that Sakata is the so-called “Demon of Shinjo City,” a local myth who supposedly rises from his grave every 50 years in order to go on an unstoppable killing spree. They want to nip that in the bud as some kind of public service.

For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear by the end of the movie, the Kimen-gumi are instructed to leave Sakata alive after they fire a bullet into his head. The hitman’s future is left uncertain, but one thing is certain: he won't be out of work for long.

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