Said spectacle begins with a scene of a blond comedian, who’s apparently famous enough to have a fan club, pawing at a young girl in an elevator. Though the girl makes not a sound, an elderly woman sharing the elevator expresses her disgust with the young man’s predatory eagerness. When the gentleman retorts by kicking the old woman against the elevator wall, his girlfriend whips out a bright red handgun and shoots him. As she leaves the scene, the bullets fired into her former date explode, along with most of his head and torso.

We soon learn that the youthful assassin is Sawa, a college student who carries out her hits under the direction of a corrupt police detective named Mr. Akai and his paunchy, lazy-eyed, creepily monotone partner, Kanie. Taking Sawa in after her parents were gruesomely murdered, the two men schooled her in the ways of assassination and set her to work. However, Sawa isn’t the sole charge of Akai and Kanie, as they also manage a moody and parentless young man known only as Oburi.

Though she’s been in Akai’s employ for years, Sawa doesn’t meet Oburi until the two of them are assigned to dispatch a trio of child molesters. The assassins strike up a curious, silence-laden friendship, even if their line of work would seem to discourage such things. Sawa appears to be firmly under Akai’s perverse control, and Oburi is intent on cutting his ties with the murder-for-hire business as soon as he can.

Akai, of course, isn’t about to let either assassin out of his sight, and the resulting conflict is played out in a bleak, brutal fashion that’s both intriguing and unsettling. Right down to the tale’s ending, Kite’s world is a thoroughly twisted one, where even the minor, unnamed characters have ugly sides and Sawa and Oburi are appealing solely because they possess dreams, and perhaps tinges of remorse for their morbid employment. The two also have decidedly human flaws -- they may be assassins, but they’re not above screwing up, and their mistakes make them far more interesting than a one-dimensional, predictably victorious kill-bot like Golgo 13.

The gritty aspects of Kite are an odd contrast to its wildly unrealistic action scenes, the most outlandish of which shows Sawa attempting to take down a pompous actor (who looks nothing at all like Bruce Willis, so just get that thought out of your head) over the course of a chaotic shootout in a restroom and an extremely destructive multi-story fall that would kill even Wile E. Coyote. It’s preposterous, over-the-top stuff, and yet it’s also presented with a colorful and intense flair that makes it easy to forgive such flagrant breaks with plausibility.

The mix of a harshly realistic story and near-cartoonish violence is seldom comfortable, but it’s handled fairly well by Yasuomi Umetsu (Robot Carnival, Hurricane Polymar), who wrote, storyboarded, and directed Kite. Umetsu is adept at portraying both sides of the production, imbuing the dramatic moments with a depressing murkiness while interspersing them with an energetic barrage of action. His smooth, almost liquideous character designs fit Kite’s sleazy atmosphere perfectly, and he isn’t afraid to use doses of black humor (watch the payment screen on Kanie’s computer, or the label on the fries he eats) and an ironic soundtrack to make the story all the coarser.

Still, Umetsu's not without problems: the story has a few puzzling holes, and he overuses the action-film cliché of having a character shoot a gun out of someone else’s hand. Umetsu also seems to be the only major name on the project, and he has his limits. While the gunplay is smooth, the character animation is limited, and too many scenes resemble the crude visuals found in cheap TV series and low-budget anime porn.

In fact, that’s what the original Japanese release of Kite was: hentai. It was financed by the porno cartoon studio Green Bunny (interesting name), which reportedly required Umetsu to thrown in a surfeit of sex scenes, some of them quite graphic and pointless. Upon buying Kite for American distribution, Media Blasters removed not only the nastier instances, but cut all of the sex entirely and turned the series, which was originally two half-hour episodes, into a single video. While such censorship would usually produce a mangled result and a massive outcry from fans, this wasn't the case with Kite. If some of the sex sequences are part of the story, they’re also excessive and disturbing, and the edited version actually improves upon them with imagery that gets the point across without nauseating the viewer.

It’s misleading for Media Blasters not to label the edited Kite as such, but the company has released a “Director’s Cut” that restores most of the original cut. I can’t really recommend it, though, as nearly all of the X-rated scenes are so utterly repulsive that they sour the entire production. And just to muddy the issue further, it’s rumored that Umestu prefers the censored edition to his original work.

Media Blasters’ improvement of Kite also extends to an English version that’s a perfect match for the show’s brutal aura. Charlie Wilson plays both Sawa’s haunted moments and her perkier side with equal aplomb, and Dave Underwood pulls off a similar act as Akai, portraying the sardonic, disillusioned police detective as well as the grotesque sadist that lurks beneath. Oburi (Shane Callahan) and Kanie (Charles Denson Jr.) have suitable voices, and the sole annoying performance in the bunch is the pompous actor that Sawa is sent after.

Though Kite’s bleak tone and crude elements may turn many viewers off, others will find it striking, stylish, and a bit more vital than exploitive mediocrity like The Professional, Wicked City, or Crying Freeman. Kite may not be easy to watch, but it's worth the effort for any fan of despondent, viscerally powerful fiction. Just make sure your copy doesn’t say “Director’s Cut.”

Edited Version: B
Director's Cut: D-