Crime Broker Reviews

This Australian thriller relies on both Japanese money and a ready-made Japanese matinee idol to create cross-cultural appeal, a strategy more appealing on paper than it proves to be in practice. Holly Soames (Jacqueline Bisset) is a respected Australian magistrate who moonlights as a criminal mastermind; from her high vantage point overlooking the heart of the Sydney financial district, she fingers likely targets for a band of free-lance bank robbers. When noted Tokyo criminologist Jin Okanazi (Masaya Koto) is brought in to solve the inexplicable rash of armored car heists, he quickly intuits the scam's dynamics, and tracks Soames to an illicit rendezvous at her den of thieves. All of this happens under the oblivious eye of police inspector Goodwin (Gary Day), with whom Soames enjoys a tangled romantic history. Meanwhile, Okanazi has plans of his own. Soon enough, heavily disguised in plastic radiation suits and weird voice boxes, Soames and Okanazi are pulling daring midday robberies together; the attendant thrills fuel a burgeoning romance. But when Okanazi bloodlessly executes a bank employee in the heat of the moment, Soames begins to back-pedal. A little detective work on her part turns up the corpses of a former accomplice and an overzealous police investigator, and it soon looks as if Okanazi has a similar fate in store for her after they cash in on their last big job together. A suspicious Goodwin finally lifts some prints and fires them off to the Tokyo PD, where he learns the real Okanazi is dead; the impostor is a psychopath who has escaped from a maximum-security medical facility. A final chase amid the Sydney skyscrapers sees the false Okanazi plummet to his death. Goodwin must choose whether to implicate old flame Soames, whom we last see pleading innocent in her own courtroom. CRIME BROKER trades on the time-honored "cop out of water" genre that saw John Wayne storm London in BRANNIGAN, Gene Hackman take Marseilles in FRENCH CONNECTION II, and Clint Eastwood hogtie Manhattan in COOGAN'S BLUFF. Here the formula is compromised by Kato's uncertain command of English, which in turn torpedoes any chemistry the principals might have established. As a judge, with a secret life of crime to boot, Bisset strains credulity. (Violence, nudity, sexual situations, adult situations, profanity.)