Eiji Uchida is keeping himself busy – that is the least one can say. In 2025, he delivered three films: Dare yori mo tsuyoki Dakishimete (2025), Night Flower (2025), and Fiamma (2025). This year, he seeks to please audiences with The Specials (2026), an action-dance comedy, and Tokyo Bust: Crime City (2026).

While many will assume that The Specials was merely a commercial assignment for Uchida will be surprised to learn that his dance-film is a personal project, a project that fulfilled his long-time wish to create an unconventional narrative centred on dance. The Specials unsurprisingly deals with themes that Uchida holds dear – societal misfits finding some stability for their own ego, a way to pacify subjective struggles, within a newly-established social bonds.

One night, after a chase on the high-way in Tokyo, the hope of Shin Kumashiro (Kippei Shiina) of having finally offed Honjo (Renji Ishibashi) quickly fades away when he discovers that the deceased is, once again, a body-double. Boss Kazama (Naomasa Musaka), not quite upset upon hearing the news, reminds him of his old promise of making him the greatest oyabun in the country and re-iterates his command to kill the only obstacle that stands in his way.

Thanks to the perceptiveness of one of his underlings, Shin learns that Honjo’s granddaughter Shiori (Yuzuki Hirakawa) is a talented dancer that, every year, participates in the highly popular Tokyo Dance-off Competition. The same underling divulges that Honjo is a doting grandfather that, in no circumstance, would miss Shiori’s competition.    

Utilizing this information, Shin Kumashiro invites Kiryu (Yuta Nakamoto), Shin (Sho Aoyagi) and Daiya (Daisuke Sakuma), three assassins with some dance-experience to form a dance-team to infiltrate the competition, yet one of them, Daiya, refuses his ridiculous well-paying offer. However, after hearing that the orphanage where he works will be torn down in the near future, he realizes that the money from the job would allow him to buy out the place.

There are some people who will question the seemingly ridiculous premise of The Specials. Yet, given the repeated failures to assassinate Honjo in simple straight-forward ways, it is a given that they need to think out of the box to actually have a chance during the dance contest, during the only time they are sure they won’t face a body double. Any spectator, who reads the introductory sequence of the film well and in good faith, will accept that any straightforward assassination attempt – e.g. a sniper in the wings, is doomed to fail because Honjo will be taking all those possibilities into account. The idea of an all-assassin dance troupe might seem ridiculous, yet is it because of its ridiculousness that one can assume that Honjo can be caught by surprise.

Yet, at the same time, the spectator feels that a lot of things can go wrong, that the ludicrous plan is far from fail-safe. The more things go their way, the more the spectator knows that something will go wrong. Uchida does right by the spectator’s suspicion with his twist-rich finale that plays, effectively, with the idea that the incalculable always forms a threat. So, can our Specials get the kill or will their plan fall apart in blood and ripped flesh?

While the assassination-plan gives Uchida’s narrative its direction, he utilizes the trajectory towards this goal to explore Daiya’s subjectivity and to trace out the effect Asuka (Urara) sorts on him. Uchida dips a bit into psychology – not that deeply, yet just enough to ensure his narrative’s emotional core can blossom and touch the spectator.  

The spectator learns, quite early in the narrative, that Dai’s refusal is caused by an unresolved childhood trauma that led him to radically excise dance from his life. His acceptance of the well-paying offer forces him, unsurprisingly, into spatial areas that call vivid fragments of his mother’s brutality as ballet teacher forth. These spatial areas, which present themselves as infected by signs which point to his mother’s cold strictness, puts his ego under siege, but also open up the possibility of diffusing his traumatic past and break the hold his mother has over his subjective position.   

Daiya finds in Asuka, the orphan who ends up teaching the bunch of misfits, a teacher that does not resemble his mother at all. It is thus, not surprising that she, with her enthusiastic presence, succeeds in breaking Daiya’s initial refusal to dance. However, he lacks, just like the others, passion; his moving body, just like the others, does not emanate pleasure.

The dimension of passion and pleasure in inaugurated by the bitter after-taste Daiya’s well-meant advice to Asuka – “It’s important to chase your dreams”- attains after her interactions with the dancing assassins. Rather than encountering adults putting Daiya’s advice into practice, she is confronted with adults that are inhibited, silently wish to escape, fight against themselves and so on. Or to put it differently, she encounters subjects who, due to their past dealing with others, have retreated in la douleur d’existance, into the void caused by traumatic experiences and/or the radical marketization or monetization of the social bond, into a subjective space devoid of passion, desire, pleasure, a space that, by overvaluing the narcissistic dimension of the ego, makes social bonds frail and volatile.   

Murasame (Hitoshi Ozawa), however, is different because his presence is structured and organized by a different social structure, by the way of the yakuza (gokudo). He opposes the monetary dynamic of social interactions of the assassins by giving voice to ideas of loyalty, debt, and repaying – “So, I owe him a favour”. He confronts, in our words, our capitalistic assassins with a symbolic system that is not structured around money, but filial ideals and a strict ethical code.  The spectator easily perceives that the only way our assassins are able to dance and form a dance-troupe is by breaking through their protective constructions (e.g. fixation on money) and allow the formation of a social bond which enables them to produce pleasure for themselves as ego and the others who surround them. 

Uchida sprinkles The Specials with surges of light-heartedness. These moments are always caused by the introduction of unexpected contrasts – e.g. the well-suited underling revealed as bicycle-riding father sporting lose training clothes, a tensive stand-off disturbed by the sudden intrusion of a cute idol-song by Iyo Matsumoto, grown men being taught by Asuka, … etc. 

The composition of The Specials is a quite straightforward affair. Dance-sequences are mainly framed with static moments. To elevate the choreographies and further heighten their light-hearted impact, Uchida turns to visual decorations like slow-motion and the occasional dynamic moment.

To frame the more action-oriented moments within his narrative, Uchida strikes a nice balance between visually emphasizing action-moves via dynamism and utilizing static moments to stage the choreographed clashing of bodies in a more organized way. He, moreover, utilizes this compositional balance thoughtfully to breathe life into the dramatic flow of the action-moments.

However, Uchida also heavily relies on sounds and music to ensure his action-moments have a pleasing dramatic effect on the spectator. By utilizing sounds to over-emphasize the swiftness of movement, he does not only acoustically support the dynamic flow of the action, but also infuses a sense of tension into the unfolding violence. The brutal aural infraction of gun-shots, on the other hand, heighten the sense of danger by evoking the possibility of mortal consequences. The musical accompaniment, on the other hand, functions as a mere frame of minimal tension upon which the rich patterns of ‘diegetic’ sounds can breathe life into the action-choreographies and the way they are composed – and thus ensures these moments entertain the spectator. 

The Specials is supported by two stand-out performances – Urara as Asuka and Hitoshi Ozawa as Murasame. With her charming presence, Asuka proves to be the fertilizer that allows the emotional dimension of the narrative to blossom. Hitoshi Osawa, on the other hand, delivers a pitch-perfect performance as yakuza old-timer. In our view, it is solely due to these performances that Uchida’s narrative is able to punch above its weight.   

The Specials will not win any awards, yet the film delivers what it promises and successfully pleases the spectator with its heartwarming message. Uchida’s film has the potential to become a crowd-pleaser, yet a crowd-pleaser that asks the spectator whether they have let their ‘reality’ sabotage their own passion. Recommended.      

Notes

General-note 1: Can you spot the references to Tanpopo (1985), the Beatles, and so on that Uchida fluidly interweaves in his narrative? 

Psycho-note 1: While the ease by whichDai is able toleave his traumatic past behind is somewhat improbable, his sudden change does highlight that a different relational dynamic is necessary for the subject to be able to extract pleasure from an act that, due to past experiences, has become ambivalent.