Kazuko Aoki

In 1978 an Osaka bank was held under siege for 40 hours by a thief, until he was killed by the police – the entire event televised live. Using that drama as a springboard for this film, director Toshiaki Takahashi and writer Takuya Nishioka worked backwards from the death of the thief to how he reached his ill-fated end. Ryudo Uzaki plays Akio Takeda, the eventual petty criminal who was warped early on by an inadequate father. Already slipping into crime as a potential career when still a teenager, Takeda determines that he will do something "really big" before the age of 30. As a first step, he changes his appearance: he gets a tattoo (identifying him as a possible yakusha,) gets an Afro, and starts work as a waiter/bartender in a "hostess" club in Osaka. Soon Takeda is managing the club and having an affair with its most popular woman – but this is not the goal he had in mind a decade earlier. And so he plans the Osaka bank robbery – making more than one fatal mistake before his last act, convinced that a tattoo, a haircut, and an attitude are all he needs to succeed.