A relentless stylishness unifies the film, extending from the hard bright lights of upscale Taipei all the way to the sleaziest junkyard of rural Japan, where the action unfolds.

The film shifts so continually and so unpredictably between bleakness and whimsy, between the sugared and the sordid, that it's very hard for viewers to stay invested in the fiction, still less in the characters.

The maverick director Sabu has made a hitman fable that's like Charlie Chaplin meets Takeshi Miike. The weird thing is, it works.

...deftly skips from gruesome violence to light-hearted comedy to soul-crushing tragedy.