City Hunter: Bay City Wars

Ryo Saeba is a private detective in Tokyo who takes any job going; he is very good with a gun and nobody takes him seriously because of his habit of pestering women. In this instalment his friends are taken hostage in a newly opened luxury hotel. Whoever has seized the building is running a far larger plan through its central computer. Ryo has to get inside together with Umibozu, who does the same work and cannot stand him. This forty-five-minute special is one of the cinema extensions of the City Hunter series. The source is Tsukasa Hojo's manga. The construction looks straight at American action films of the eighties, and the skyscraper, the hostages, the lone man and the jump from the roof on a fire hose do not hide it. Anyone who has not seen the series will find the relationships between the characters underdrawn, though the action carries itself. Comedy and gunfire keep swapping places.