As always, Takeshi Kitano focuses on characters excluded from Japan's 'economic miracle'. His protagonist Masaki (Ono Masahiko), is a hopeless loser: no education (he is slow on the uptake); no prospects (he works part-time as a petrol-station attendant); no baseball skills (which implies a deficient sense of his place in Japanese society). He imagines crashing a stolen oil-tanker into the yakuza headquarters. In his mind, this suicide gives meaning and shape to a life-time of underachievement. Kitano's own extended cameo as Uehara, the Okinawan gangster who commands self-sacrificing loyalty from his friend Tamagi despite expecting his to sever a finger, submit to sodomy and so on, is a creation in the league of French writer Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi: a lord of misrule, the embodiment of the disorderly underside of orderly Japan. As a controlled, music-free account of violence, crime and immorality on the verge of erupting through society's placid surfaces, the film is remarkable enough. What makes it phenomenal is Kitano's completely instinctive reinvention of the grammar and syntax of narrative filmmaking, unique in the popular cinema of the 1990s. Although it gave Kitano his second director credit, Boiling Point has all the hallmarks of a film by a debut director determined to get every idea he has ever had about film, life, death and baseball up there on the screen. His subsequent films, such as Sonatine (1993) and Hana-Bi (1997), are more mature but cannot recapture the raw aesthetic excitement of these beginnings.

A lot of the comments have been about the film's relationship to the nature of violence, and it's true that it is a violent film. However, that's not the point of the movie. The film starts showing a young man sitting in the dark. He comes out into the light and walks slowly to where the action is taking place. He is dull, uninvolved, uninterested in what's going on. In the beginning, events happen to him. It is only after he is attacked by a hoodlum that he begins to take action himself. He volunteers for the mission to buy a gun and while on that expedition he is exposed to a wide variety of experiences that force him to become a more active personality. After his return he shows himself to be a take charge guy. The symbolism of the butterfly eggs is one of metamorphosis. The title "Boiling Point" has a meaning of change, the point at which water turns to steam. Finally, the last scene is of him in the same darkness as he was at the beginning, but this time when he emerges his movements are quick and jaunty. He is a different man.

this is my 3rd Kitano movie (after Violent Cop & Brother), i enjoyed this as much as the other, Kitano's movies move at such a pace which you think would be boring but there's something about his movies which draws you in.This film was pretty much hilarious and brutal at the same time, i mean you wouldn't usually laugh at woman getting used for sex and getting slapped about harshly at every turn, but the way Takeshi's character does it makes it hilarious, especially the scene involing the ice lollies outside the store...bizarre humour.This movie had a strange story, it never goes into enough depth to make you get real sucked into the characters, so the final scene, whilst spectacular kind of leaves you thinking 'they all died?'.Other than a pretty shallow story i found this very entertaining...Takeshi's movies rule! Check this.

While not as good as some of Takeshi Kitano's other films like Violent Cop or Fireworks, this still has much to recommend it. For one, this has Kitano's always-stunning direction and twisted mix of comedy and shocking violence. Kitano himself appears in a small role as a gangster, and it's perhaps his most twisted role to date. I would probably only recommend this film to Kitano fans, since it is very muddled and not as tight as his other films. But as a Kitano fan myself, I did like it very much.