Demon City (2025)

Demon City (2025)

2/10

Starring

Tôma Ikuta

Masahiro Higashide

Miou Tanaka

Directed by Seiji Tanaka

 

We may have to wait a long time before movie producers decide to stop rehashing the same old hitman-retiring plot.

There has to be a new way to get the protagonist angry enough to go after people for revenge. This is why I liked John Wick (Part 1—before the plot got convoluted with too many sequels). The whole revenge story was simple: You killed my dog, embarrassed me in my own house—now I’m coming after you.

But this movie didn’t bother coming up with a fresh reason for the protagonist (Sakata) to seek revenge. Instead, it stuck to the same old, predictable setup. He met a woman, started a family, and decided it was time to get out of the game. So, he did one last job and walked. But, of course, the people who hired him weren’t just going to let him go. So, they decided to kill him and his family, and in this plot frame him for killing his family, making it look like after the act, he tried to kill himself.

The acting in this movie is not spectacular and definitely not memorable. The silent, brooding protagonist trope is overplayed and, at times, just plain annoying. The first fifteen minutes are filled with horrible dialogue and weak performances. The movie was so predictable that I could guess what was going to happen within those first fifteen minutes.

One of the other issues with the movie is the unrealistic nature of the action scenes. For example, Sakata woke up from his vegetative state and—conveniently and briefly, I might add—was able to fight like he had the powers of the Hulk.

The plot picks up ten years after the incident with his family, where he was shot in the head. But luckily for us viewers, he didn’t die. Instead, he was in a vegetative state. His friend and former partner from his hitman days is now taking care of him. Sakata somehow manages to recover, and at this point, the movie takes a nosedive, challenging itself to deliver even worse acting, worse planning, worse writing, and worse fight choreography than what we had already endured.

So, Sakata is back, and he wants revenge on the people who killed his family. From here, the movie makes it ridiculously easy for him to track them down—it felt more like the writers were mocking us than putting in any real detective work.

All the usual betrayals and surprise survivals happen, and by the end, I felt like I had completely wasted my time and existence watching this. Here’s a movie you should not see for any reason at all. I can’t even think of a single strength worth mentioning.