A reasonably conventional thriller from the director of all things outre. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

Wow. Who'd have thought a Miike Takashi movie would rate a lowly IIB? Japan's edgiest mainstream filmmaker - the man who gave the world the twisted likes of Audition and Ichii the Killer - has proven on more than one occasion that he's also adept with traditional cops and robbers. Gonzo deaths aside, the Dead or Alive trilogy is, at its most basic, gangster drama. One Missed Call and entries in the Masters of Horror and Three: Extremes anthologies prove he knows his way around horror and 13 Assassins and Hara-Kiri Death of a Samurai are the work of a prolific filmmaker broadening his horizons. Miike at his weakest is better than a lot of people's best.

So that makes Shield of Straw something of an oddity. By no means Miike's best work, this adaptation of yet another bestselling crime novel (the Japanese seem to produce a lot of crime novels) has a lot going for it despite some serious faults. But what could have been a rote procedural is given some flair and a few outstanding set pieces for a solid thriller that illustrates one of Miike's favorite milieu: the rotten underbelly of Japanese society.

When a little girl is raped and murdered, her trillionaire grandfather puts a billion-yen bounty on the prime suspect's head. Naturally this brings every mercenary thug out of the woodwork, forcing the previously convicted pedophile, Kiyomaru (Fujiwara Tatsuya, Battle Royale, Death Note) to turn himself in to police for his own protection. Two special security officers, the grieving Mekari (Osawa Takao, schmaltz-fest Crying Out Love in the Center of the World) and single mother Shirawai (Matsushima Nanako, Ring) and two of Tokyo's finest, Okumura (Kishitani Goro, Miike's Crows Zero) and Sekiya (Ibu Masato) are charged with escorting the prisoner back to Tokyo into the hands of the public prosecutor.

There's a silly strain to Shield of Straw that smacks of a manga writer trying his hand at fiction, which the source material's Kiuchi Kazuhiro is best known for. Improbabilities pile upon contrived coincidences; conspiracies come fast and furious. After the four cops manage to get past their suspicion of each other they're on their guard for crooked SWAT members, nurses, train conductors and everyone else looking to score the reward. But Miike knows how to stage an action sequence as well as anyone and the relentless forward momentum manifests in spectacular sequences on a bullet train, a Duel-esque pursuit on a crowded highway and a low-key showdown at high noon in downtown Tokyo. Hayashi Tamiyo hasn't quite shaded Kiyomaru as well as he could have, which proves to be the film's biggest flaw. No one expects a sympathetic child killer, but there was room to make Kiyomaru truly horrifying given the casting of the baby-faced Fujiwara. As it stands, he's a cackling, remorseless freak. Full stop.

But he's just a plot tool. Shield of Straw is less about the central crime as it is about justice and revenge, and the civilizing power of the former and the cathartic satisfaction of the latter. Mekari has his own vicarious reasons to kill Kiyomaru, and it's his monumental struggle to maintain his professionalism - no matter the circumstances - that drive the narrative. That and watching Miike work within the bounds of standard genre cinema.

Shield of Straw opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Mekari (Osawa Takao, right) has finally had enough of Kiyomaru (Fujiwara Tatsuya) in the latest from Japanese bad boy Miike Takashi, Shield of Straw

The ultra-wealthy Ninagawa (Yamazaki Tsutomu) takes the law into his own hands and puts a bounty on his granddaughter's killer in Shield of Straw

(HK Edition 09/06/2013 page7)